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Reuters goes ‘Inside the iPhone Patent Portfolio’ to predict future iPhone technology, litigation

Thomson Reuters is out with new a paper, titled “Inside the iPhone Patent Portfolio,” with the goal of highlighting “patent and litigation activity across Apple’s 1,298 mobile patents.” Within the report, Thomson Reuters IP analyst Bob Stembridge takes a look at the 416 smartphone patents Apple has filed since the launch of the original iPhone in 2007 to determine what new technology Apple will likely include in future versions of the iPhone. Among the new technologies, the report claimed could likely end up in a future iPhone: a fuel cell system for keeping devices charged for days or weeks and an educational feature in iOS that would display images and more information about text…

Among Apple’s mobile-related patents, individual technologies that stand out as key indicators of what future smartphone design may hold include a fuel cell system that will allow a portable device to stay charged for days or weeks, and an educational content display feature that allows users to interact with text to see images of what the word(s) mean.

The paper also studied the patent wars and put together a chart tracking all of Apple’s IP-related litigation from 2008 to 2012. In Figure 2 (above), Reuters provided a breakdown of Apple’s lawsuits by defendant, plaintiff, counter-plaintiff, etc., while in Figure 3 we see Apple’s increasing number of lawsuits, reaching over 150 IP-related cases by 2012.

figure 4 depicts apple’s increased aggressiveness in defending its ip by tracking the company’s initiation of patent infringement suits between 2007 and June of 2012.  as of June 2012, apple had already filed nearly as many patent suits as it did in 2010 and 2011 combined.

The full report also highlighted the most disputed patents between Samsung and Apple, and Apple’s core technology areas, after analyzing more than 1,217 patents that the company has filed since 2000.

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Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s Logic Pros series.


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