A court in California ordered Samsung to stop selling select smartphones in the United States. These devices are believed to infringe on three Apple patents.
It appears that the Apple v. Samsung war over patents is far from over, but the Cupertino brand's victory this time seems to be a tad small.
The Samsung devices that are now banned are relatively outdated compared with the smartphones that the South Korea-based company has released a few years ago.
The list includes Admire, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note 2, Galaxy S2, Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch, Galaxy S2 Skyrocket, Galaxy S3 and Stratosphere. It's also worth mentioning that Samsung doesn't even sell most of these devices that the court banned in the United States anymore.
Meanwhile, the patents that Apple says that Samsung infringed include one for the "slide to unlock" feature, one for predictive text and one for autocorrect.
What this means is that Apple didn't exactly get something big out of the matter, where an additional win on its lawyers' track record is the only considerable outcome.
As a testament to that, Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents gives his two cents regarding the incident.
"Samsung can still provide the functionality by simply avoiding the implementation it used in its oldest products," he says.
What's more, Jung Dong Joon of SU Intellectual Property in Seoul chimed in along the same lines.
"The latest move will only have a minimal impact on Samsung's mobile business because most of the models to be banned are too old, while it gave Apple more negotiating power when it comes to patents," he says.
On the other hand, Samsung says that it's "very disappointed" of Apple's actions. The company notes that it won't have an impact on American consumers, but it is a case of Apple "abusing the judicial system to create bad legal precedent."
Apple seems relentless in hounding Samsung for patent infringement, as it recently claimed in another case that the latter should pay $180 million more than the court ordered. The patents involved in this case include include patents for the bezel, application icons and the front display.
