After China's iPhone injunction, Qualcomm has recently secured another sales ban, this one in Germany, and now the chip maker has put aside €1.34 billion, or approximately $1.5 billion, in security bonds which are required to enforce German ruling.
Qualcomm has secured another victory in its legal spat with Apple, this time in Germany after a Munich court ruled that some iPhone models that employ Intel-made cellular modems violate a Qualcomm patent which covers so-called envelope tracking, a feature that helps smartphones save battery power while sending and receiving wireless signals.
Apple's acknowledged that the iPhone-exclusive iOS 12.1.2 software update has indeed circumvented a pair of Qualcomm patents—in spite of Qualcomm's claims to the contrary.
Even though Apple has not officially confirmed that the latest iOS 12.1.2 update does pack in fixes for a pair of Qualcomm software patents that were supposed to remove any infringing functionality, Qualcomm told Reuters yesterday that the Cupertino firm remains in violation of a Chinese court’s orders to stop selling iPhone 6s through iPhone X in the country.
Apple will soon release special iOS updates to its Chinese customers that were specifically created to circumvent a pair of patents, owned by Qualcomm, which are essential to an iPhone injunction that the chip maker has won recently in the 1.33 billion people country.
According to a new report, Apple has been actively hiring silicon engineers for its San Diego office to work alongside the company's growing Wireless Architecture team on a years-long effort to develop a custom cellular modem for future iPhone models.
All hopes for some sort of settlement with Qualcomm were dashed today as Apple told Reuters it was not in talks “at any level” to settle its wide-ranging legal dispute with the chip maker.
With 5G standards now finalized, the companies behind the technology are making pricing decisions that will influence future mobile devices. For Apple, adding 5G to new iPhones could cost the company $21 per device, according to VentureBeat.
The upcoming 2018 iPhone lineup might only use Intel-based modems. This news comes from Qualcomm's financial chief who confirmed that his company's modems wouldn't be included in this year's lineup. If correct, this would represent a significant change on Apple's part.
Qualcomm on Monday is celebrating recently announced Ookla download speed tests that pit its Snapdragon 845 against the Intel XMM 7480. The former is found on high-end Android phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S9, while the latter is on the Apple iPhone X, among others devices.
Bringing 5G networking to mobile devices hasn't been an easy process. First, stakeholders need to agree to a standard, then new modems need to be developed. Qualcomm recently cleared one of the most significant hurdles in the development process with the announcement of its new QTM052 mmWave antenna modules, the first that that will enable the high-speed swath of networking spectrum to work with mobile phones, according to The Verge.
MediaTek is expected to supply Wi-Fi chips to Apple for the HomePod speaker. The Taiwanese company has bigger plans, however, as it hopes to replace Qualcomm as one of Apple's modem chip providers for iPhone, according to DigiTimes.