HTC Devices Held At US Customs

US Customs officials are indefinitely holding shipments of the HTC One X and Evo 4G LTE, becoming the first HTC devices to be subject to an import delay for infringing an Apple patent.

Apple was awarded an injunction by the US International Trade Commission (ITC) last December, but HTC was given until mid-April to remove the offending patent.

Custom offences

In the latest leg of their long-running court battle, Apple alleged HTC had infringed on 10 of its patents, but the Taiwanese manufacturer was found to have violated only one, which related to the automatic conversion of phone numbers and emails into links in messages. The ITC’s delay of the ban for HTC to remove the functionality led many experts to label the injunction superfluous.

However, customs has decided to hold the devices to investigate, even though the HTC One X hadn’t been announced at the time of the injunction, as it relates to all HTC devices.

HTC lost a court battle in Germany last year against IPCom, which said that it was going to seek a ban on the sale of HTC’s 3G devices in the country as it violated its 3G-essential patents. Apple was itself cleared of violating HTC’s patents last November.

The HTC One X was announced at Mobile World Congress in February, along with the One S and One V,  in an effort to increase the high-end quality of HTC’s mobile range. The Android Ice Cream Sandwich-powered One X is the flagship model, boasting a 1.5GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and a 4.2-inch 720p LCD Gorilla Glass display.

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