US patent law is one of the most fucked up IP systems in the world.

Things like giving patent for multi touch display should never happen.

Funny how despite all this Win Phone 7 is still crushed by its competitors, including Android, anyway. Besides this, Samsung has a longer story than HTC in the cellphone market, so it has a far bigger patent portfolio and huge experience about prior art in the field, it could easily get the lamest, most obvious and fishy patents used to attack it declared void. Let's just hope those big patent trolls chose the wrong target to bully and end up with their noses broken.

Killing?

In a matter of 2 years Google Android is activating 550k a day, they are simply unstoppable right now even with the Iphone being so popular. More over, just last year Apple had occupied 97% of the tablet market, it's down to 61% now. If any company is being killed, its Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Google is simply taking over and getting Apple and Ms very scared.

@ psrock

The point is that, with no information on how much revenue Google is actually making from licensing and advertising on Android devices, Android may actually end up generating more money for Google's competition than it does for Google itself. Microsoft's deal with HTC is 60% of the cost to license WinPho7, and MS didn't have to invest in any new R&D or marketing to get it.

With pending lawsuits from Oracle and Apple, and possible new lawsuits from Nokia and the Nortel patents that everybody but Google has access to, the price of "free" Android keeps going up. Android's rapid growth has been driven primarily by phone manufacturers and carriers seeking a software competitor to iOS. If MS can provide that software at a lower cost by protecting phone manufacturers from patent lawsuits, that's a serious challenge to Android.

BTW, that tablet marketshare stat you cite is based on shipments. According to Google's own activation numbers, only 1.3 million or so Android 3.x devices have been sold to customers. Apple's actual marketshare is probably still around 80%.

Google can easily gather ambiguous patents to protect Android from other ambiguous ones. And older cellphone producers like Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and others most probably already have a patent portfolio far larger than HTC to fend off patent trolls, heck, LG presented and launched the first LG Prada, almost equal to the first iPhone, months before Apple presented and launched the iPhone itself. Motorola, despite its troubles, surely has a patent portfolio large enough, in the telco field, to cack on Apple and MS and any of their patent claims.

I remember reading that HTC had to pay Microsoft for each device that used HTC Sense because HTC Sense apparently infringing on Microsoft's patents. But I read that the Nexus One was cited as part of the reason for Apple's lawsuits. Nexus One's OS is pure vanilla Android. So I take it they infringed on a hardware patent. Man HTC can't catch a break. Even when they don't use HTC Sense (HTC should ditch it IMO. They have to pay MS to use it and it slows down performance), HTC is getting fucked in court. Freakin bullshit. I would have liked to see HTC (and Samsung) continue on with the Nexus line for Google. American IP law blows.