Part of the hullabaloo surrounding Apple’s recent litigation against HTC was that it supposedly came with little warning. That would have left HTC without much time to find suitable workarounds for the infringements in question, if it actually wasn’t warned in the first place. According to Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner, Apple did warn handset makers that it would be much stricter with regard to IP violations in the new year.

“Starting in January, Apple launched a series of C-Level discussions with tier-1 handset makers to underscore its growing displeasure at seeing its iPhone-related IP [intellectual property] infringed. The lawsuit filed against HTC thus appears to be Apple’s way of putting a public, lawyered-up exclamation point on a series of blunt conversations that have been occurring behind closed doors,” Reiner wrote in a report on the matter. If he’s to be believe, HTC may be the first in a string of suits that could lead to lucrative licensing deals for several of Apple’s technologies.

Source: CNN

An irate iPhone customer has decided to take legal action concerning the lack of MMS support for the iPhone on AT&T. The case, which is being brought by an Ohioan, Deborah Carr, claims that both AT&T and Apple used tricky marketing to mislead customers into believing they would have MMS support in June.

The brief is actually pretty funny. It claims that millions of customers purchased the iPhone 3G and 3GS after the “false and deceptive representations and concealments of Apple and AT&T” led consumers to believe they would have MMS support. Yeah, I don’t know about you guys, but that’s exactly why I bought my iPhone. The brief also refers to the alleged day in June when iPhone MMS would become available as “wonderful.”

Now I’m not on AT&T‘s side here. Quite the opposite. The MMS delay is completely absurd, but so is this brief. Referring to the ability to send picture messages via MMS as “wonderful” is sad, and it smacks of a clinically diagnosable level of obsession with cellular service. Will it be nice when I can send a picture message from my phone? Sure. Will it be life-changing? No.

Why Mrs. Carr and the lawyer who went in on this couldn’t have more appropriately worded the brief is beyond me. The words “excessive delay,” and “denied service without adequate cause” just have such a nice ring to them.