Bangalore: That patent wars can ruin one’s appetite for technology, is something yet to be proved.

A week ago, the International Trade commission placed a ban on HTC devices (such as HTC EVO 4G) that use parts of Apple’s “data-tapping” patent.

The 2 sections of the patent as pointed out by Forbes (that were used in the ruling) dealt with a feature that allowed phone users to “tap” data.
This meant that if data such as a phone number was included in an unstructured document, such as a note or an email, the user could call the number, just by tapping or clicking it, since the action would launch the phone’s dialer app, or the receiver of the email could add the number to his/her contacts with a single touch.

Now although the ban prohibits HTC (a Taiwan-based company) to selling devices from April 19, 2012, it allows the company to import “fixed” products to honor the warranties on sold devices, till Dec 19, 2013.

But does the war really end there? As stated by the Boston Globe, HTC was the only one, Apple filed a complaint against for this feature, but other Android phone manufacturing companies could be affected as well since it is actually built-in.

Apple also filed a case against Samsung corp. in California for adding a bounce effect to the final contact when the list is scrolled to the end. Although the case is still pending, Google modified this feature to make the contacts attain an orange glow when the user scrolls to the end.

Google faced some positive-looking court action this month too, as Motorola won a case against Apple for using a patent that included a “method for performing a countdown function during a mobile-originated transfer for a packet radio system", and Motorola mobility solutions will soon be a part of Google.

So where does this all end? One will have to wait and see.