14 DAY TRIAL // Even though all eyes are now focused on NVIDIA’s patents lawsuit filed against Samsung and Qualcomm, there’s another lawsuit that should embarrass another Asian company, Huawei.
US-based carrier T-Mobile recently filed a lawsuit against Chinese company Huawei over repeated hardware smuggling attempts targeting a cellphone-testing robot called “Tappy.”
The Seattle Times reports that T-Mobile claims Huawei employees photographed the robot and tried to smuggle components out of the carrier’s Bellevue laboratory.
What’s more hilarious is the fact that even after they were banned, Huawei’s employees relentlessly tried to sneak in the laboratory and obtain as much info and hardware components as possible out of the cellphone-testing robot.
Obviously, they were caught by T-Mobile’s security and led off, but this is not the first time Huawei is spying on the Magenta carrier’s technology.
T-Mobile claims that the cellphone-testing robot debuted in 2007 was the first of its kind. Tappy can test handsets “by performing touches on the phone the same way a human being would - only much more frequently in a shorter period of time.”
This would allow for lower budgets when it comes to testing products, hence Huawei’s need to reproduce such technology for its own smartphones.
Even though T-Mobile does not mention the damages it seeks to be awarded with, it does say that it lost tens of millions of dollars due to Huawei’s industrial espionage.
T-Mobile also claims that a Huawei engineer stole the robot's simulated fingertips in 2012 We agree that these things happen and big corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars for industrial espionage on its rivals, but few of them admit their fault. Well, Huawei did just that, though it did not expect the issue to escalate into a lawsuit.
Here is what Huawei’s official William Plummer had to say about the lawsuit filed by T-Mobile: “There is some truth to the complaint in terms of two Huawei employees acting inappropriately in their zeal to better understand the customer’s quality testing requirements.”
“As a result, those employees were terminated for violating our business conduct guidelines. As for the rest of the complaint, Huawei respects T-Mobile’s right to file suit and we will cooperate fully with any investigation or court proceeding to protect our rights and interests,” he continued.
It appears that the reason why Huawei employees were trying to smuggle software and hardware from Tappy was purely for solving some issues with results between T-Mobile’s robot and its own robot built years ago.
Basically, Huawei successfully spied on T-Mobile USA and managed to build its own Tappy robot, but the robot wasn’t as effective as the carrier’s. According to Huawei, the employees caught spying were in fact trying to find and resolve some of the discrepancies between T-Mobile’s robot and Huawei’s.