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Nokia has sued Apple in 11 countries. Here is why?

Nokia said, it was suing Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of violating 32 technology patents. On Thursday, the Finnish telecoms equipment maker said it had now filed 40 patent suits. Nokia’s acted after Apple’s legal action targeting the one-time cellphone industry leader a day earlier.

Nokia Corp has said it has filed lawsuits against Apple Inc in 11 countries over 40 patents covering technologies such as displays, software and chipsets, in what can only be reminiscent of the Apple-Samsung battle.

Nokia said on Wednesday it was suing Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of violating 32 technology patents. On Thursday, the Finnish telecoms equipment maker said it had now filed 40 patent suits. Nokia’s acted after Apple’s legal action targeting the one-time cellphone industry leader a day earlier.

Nokia, which was the largest cellphone maker before being decimated by Apple and other Android handset makers, believes that the iPhone wouldn’t have been possible without it sharing its patents with Apple for royalty for the last few years.

The company claimed that it had filed the patents after putting in a lot of investment into research which it thinks need to come back from Apple.

The contract between Nokia and Apple that was scripted five years ago is about to expire on December 31. Apple has paid royalties during the last five years but Nokia wants it to keep paying for it along with licensing other additional patents that the Finnish company came up with.

However, Apple has said that Nokia’s demand qualify as extortion and is refusing to pay anything. But the lawsuits are the result of an impasse after two to three years of tense negotiations between the two companies.

“Apple is saying, we want to pay one low price and not have to deal with any of your patents again,” Clem Roberts, an intellectual property lawyer at Durie Tangri in San Francisco, told the New York Times (NYT). “Nokia is saying, ‘I don’t want that low price because my patents are worth more than that.’”

Another industry expert, on conditions of anonymity, said that the impasse signifies the struggle of erstwhile handset players like Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia to gain from the booming smartphone industry.

“Obviously, the iPhone was not created on a green field but was built on what others created before Apple,” Florian Mueller, a German iPhone app developer and former consultant to technology companies, was quoted as saying by the NYT. “On the other hand, the iPhone was a paradigm shift. It was more of a mobile computer than a mobile phone,” Mueller, who has followed the cell phone patent wars, added.

Patent-makers such as Nokia can now use a US supreme court ruling nearly 10 years ago, which said that patent owners had to stop selling their devices if the patent was violated, to their advantage.

Nokia’s shares were down nearly 5% at 4.496 euros on Thursday as analysts warned a legal battle with Apple could hold up royalty payments that are vital to shoring up the Finnish company’s profits.

WhatsApp Gets Message Quotes and Replies

HIGHLIGHTS >>>>


--- The replies appear alongside the original messages as quotes.

--- The feature is available for both Android and iOS.

--- It can be seen in both one-on-one and group conversations.

WhatsApp can quote messages you want to respond to

WhatsApp has got a new feature that will let users quote messages when replying. While earlier this week, the new feature was spotted in beta builds of WhatsApp for Android, it is now rolling out for most users across Android and iOS running the general release builds from Google Play and the App Store.

The message quotes and replies feature is self-explanatory and the user needs to long press a message in any conversation to see a reply option pop up alongside star, delete, forward, and copy.







On tapping the reply button, the original message will appear as a quote, and users can reply to that. On the receivers end, the quoted message will appear as a grey box with the reply below it. The feature works on one-to-one chats as well as group chats.

The Facebook-owned messaging service has been adding new features at a steady pace. The company was recently spotted testing the video calling feature briefly on its Android beta app. On the iOS beta of the app on the other hand, recently saw the inclusion of gif image sharing support.

Earlier this year, the messaging service WhatsApp announced that it now had 1 billion monthly active users.

The last major update to the platform was last month - the addition of document sharing on WhatsApp Web. Shortly before that, the company rolled out its first desktop app for Windows and OS X.