14 DAY TRIAL // HTC has reportedly left the United Kingdom following a patent dispute, with phones launched by the company no longer available at its online store and third-party shops.
While an official announcement in this regard isn’t yet available, a report from BBC reveals that all phones are currently listed as out of stock on the company’s UK website, albeit they continue to be up for grabs in other markets.
A company official speaking to the linked source refused to confirm or deny the speculation, but said a patent dispute is indeed under way and it only concerns a single model.
“As a leading innovator, HTC takes intellectual property issues very seriously. We are proactively investigating an infringement claim by a third party with respect to a single handset model,” the company representative was quoted as saying.
HTC tight-lipped on the patent dispute
By the looks of things, HTC leaving the United Kingdom comes after a patent war with a research and development company called IPCom and which took the Taiwanese phone manufacturer to court back in 2009. At that point, HTC was accused of violating a patent related to wireless technology developed for car phones, but also used in mobile phones.
The smartphone maker agreed to make a series of changes to its devices in order to avoid the patent violation, but according to IPCom, this didn’t happen. A new series of tests specifically supposed to determine whether the patent infringement has been resolved were performed earlier this year, and the researchers discovered that HTC was yet to address the problem.
Details continue to be more or less vague right now, especially because official statements from the companies involved in the patent dispute are missing, but at this point, HTC’s handsets appear to be missing in action in the United Kingdom.