Two weeks after Apple filed suit against HTC for infringing on 20 Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) patents related to the device, underlying architecture and hardware, the Android-and-Windows-Phone-maker has issued a formal response from its North American headquarters in Seattle.
HTC’s CEO Peter Chou said: “HTC disagrees with Apple’s actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible.”
It appears from the content of the statement that part of HTC’s argument against the suit is in proving that HTC has been around for much longer than Apple’s two-year old entry into the smartphone market.
HTC was founded in 1997 and produced its first smartphone for O2 in 2002, which had a 3.5-inch color touchscreen display. Work on that started as early as 1999, Chou argued. From there, it named a number of firsts: First Windows PDA (1998); First Windows Phone (June 2002); First 3G CDMA EVDO smartphone (October 2005); First gesture-based smartphone (June 2007); First Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android smartphone (October 2008); First 4G WIMAX smartphone (November 2008).
While HTC’s history stretches back to the 90s, Apple has accomplished more in a short time, making it more Goliath and HTC resemble David. According to IDC, HTC had a 4.6 percent global share of the smartphone market in 2009, compared with Apple’s 14.4 percent.
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