HTC Articles - Software Expert Witnesses & Litigation Consultants

8February

Quandary Peak Assists in Nokia v. HTC Patent Litigation

By Quandary Peak Research

Nokia’s recent settlement with HTC over smartphone patents was widely reported in the media on Friday, resulting in the dismissal of all pending patent litigation worldwide between the two companies. Industry observers widely cited the outcome as an important step for Nokia in its effort to generate royalties from its patent portfolio.

Right up until the settlement was finalized, several of our software experts here at Quandary Peak were working earnestly with the attorneys at Desmarais LLP on behalf of Nokia. Nenad Medvidovic, George Edwards, and Brad Ulrich were all down in the trenches, performing the painstaking work of documenting the technical evidence related to the patents-in-suit in the matters before the International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The patents disclosed inventions related to receiving push messages, downloading and installing apps over the network, video compression and encoding, protecting sensitive device configuration data, Bluetooth connectivity, calendar data management, and other technologies. The analysis by Quandary Peak included C++ source code review and Java source code review.

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17September

Edwards Tapped to Testify on GPS, Navigation, and Mapping Patents

By Quandary Peak Research

Dr. George Edwards, Quandary Peak’s resident guru of location-based mobile services, has been asked to testify as an expert witness in a lawsuit alleging infringement of a patent for “Method and System for Providing an Image Vector-Based Traffic Information.” The case, Porto Technology, Co., Ltd. et al. v. Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless, was filed Sept. 20, 2012 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Claim 1 of the patent at issue in the case, US Patent 6,233,518, discloses a method of providing an image-based traffic information in a region having at least one time-variant real entity. The method includes forming a traffic state map, transmitting the traffic state map to a user device, and displaying an image in accordance with the traffic state map on a screen of the user device. The patent was filed in 1999 by Heung-Soo Lee and was granted in 2001.

Edwards was engaged by plaintiff’s counsel Fox Rothschild, LLP, a national law firm with over five hundred attorneys. Edwards expects to draw on his knowledge, skills, and training in a variety of mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Qualcomm Brew, Palm Web OS, and RIM BlackBerry OS. Edwards’ conclusions will be based on a technical analysis of C++ and Java source code.

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9September

Wireless and Mobile Tech Trends: Tablet Data Usage and Android Jelly Bean

By Quandary Peak Research

Cellular data usage for tablets is up a marked 48% year on year in the first quarter of 2013, according to a data consumption report released by consumer market research firm NPD Group. This isn’t a huge surprise, considering people are increasingly shifting video consumption and web browsing to tablets, and given consumers use cellular when Wi-Fi, mobile hotspots, or tethering aren’t options.

A 48% jump in data usage may seem sizable, but it still only brings cellular usage for tablets to 12% of the total market in the US—meaning only three out of every twenty-five tablets are using cellular. Taken together with Consumer Electronics Association’s survey showing that 41 percent of the online US consumers polled already own a tablet and 72 percent plan to purchase one soon, this is an indication that there is significant market share for cellular data usage (and tablets) up for grabs.

What Does That Mean for Google’s Jelly Bean?

This past July, after much speculation and fanfare, Google finally released a new update to its Android operating system. Dubbed Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, it’s not available for everyone. Google has reserved the July release exclusively for its own line of products like the new Nexus 7. Reports, however, suggest that it will soon be available for widespread use.

Early chatter from the user community seems to indicate that Android 4.3 is making devices run faster, and in particular, Kevin C. Tofel reports that users of 2012 Nexus tablets are experiencing much better performance. On gigaom.com, Tofel highlights a specific software command in Android 4.3 called TRIM that works like “the old Disk Defragmenter on Microsoft Windows PCs which cleaned up the file system and put contiguous file bits in order on the hard drive to speed up I/O performance.”

Another interesting […]

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7August

Code Review of Android and Windows Devices Completed

By Quandary Peak Research

Software consultants at Quandary Peak recently completed an lengthy, in-depth source code review of twenty-nine mobile devices running the Android, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone 7 operating systems. The consultants, George Edwards and Brad Ulrich, drew on their many years of experience in smartphone application development and mobile systems research to document the structure and behavior of the software components at issue. Both Brad and George have worked on a number of cases as an Android expert witness.

The extensive analysis effort was conducted on behalf of Desmarais LLP in connection with a patent infringement matter, MobileMedia Ideas LLC v. HTC Corporation and HTC America Inc. The case initially involved eleven patents for smartphone technology related to voice dialing, call handling, contacts management, media playback and streaming, and image processing. The patents asserted by MMI were U.S. Patents 5,490,170, 5,841,979, 5,915,239, 5,977,887, 6,043,760, 6,049,796, 6,070,068, 6,253,075, 6,427,078, 6,871,048, and 7,349,012.

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8July

Quandary Peak Experts Analyze Android Camera Architecture

By Quandary Peak Research

George Edwards and Nenad Medvidovic, two software experts affiliated with Quandary Peak Research, recently completed a comprehensive examination of the camera software architecture of over a dozen Android devices. The two also analyzed a handful of mobile phones powered by Qualcomm’s Brew platform. The inspection and analysis of C++ and Java source code was an immense task and was central to the technical arguments in the case.

George and Neno performed the source code review, which extended over a period of several months, on behalf of Chinese mobile device manufacturer ZTE, and ZTE’s counsel, Goodwin Procter. ZTE, along with Huawei, Pantech, and HTC, is under investigation by the International Trade Commission (ITC) as a result of patent infringement allegations filed by FlashPoint Technology. Neno was deposed as an Android expert witness and testified at the trial.

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