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The smartphone wars or smartphone patents licensing and litigation refers to commercial struggles among smartphone manufacturers including Sony Mobile (formerly Sony Ericsson), Google, Apple Inc., Samsung Mobile, Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, Huawei, LG Electronics, ZTE and HTC, by patent litigation and other means. The conflict is part of the wider "patent wars" between technology and software corporations.[ citation needed ]
To secure and increase market share, companies granted a patent can sue to prevent competitors from using the methods the patent covers. Since 2010 the number of lawsuits, counter-suits, and trade complaints based on patents and designs in the market for smartphones, and devices based on smartphone OSes such as Android and iOS, has increased significantly.[ citation needed ]
Initial suits, countersuits, rulings, license agreements, and other major events in italics: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
The pattern of suing and countersuing really began in 2009 as growth in the demand for smartphones accelerated dramatically with the advent of the modern smartphone, which combined a responsive touch screen with a modern multi-tasking operating system, a browser that provided full web access and an application store, in the form of the Apple iPhone 3G and the first Android phones.
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