ITWire

"HTC appears to be less determined than Apple and much less sure of having a strong case because otherwise it would, like Apple, take concurrent action at both levels, or if it had to choose between the two, HTC would take Apple to a court of law. Only filing a complaint in hopes of a governmental agency doing most of the work looks weak."

Mueller gave HTC little chance of success, saying: "I have serious doubts that HTC's apparently half-hearted counter strike will scare Apple. HTC's light warfare is probably no match for Apple's heavy artillery'¦HTC asserts five patents while Apple asserted 20.

"HTC had to choose its five bullets out of a rather small arsenal while Apple could pick its 20 out of an arsenal amounting to thousands of patents, which makes it much more likely, in purely statistical terms, that Apple's selection of patents poses a threat to HTC than vice versa."

He speculated that: "Maybe HTC hopes that its announcement could build some kind of pressure on Apple via its customers and shareholders."

According to Mueller, "The Android open-source project is the reason for which Apple sued HTC in the first place" and he suggested that eventually Android's creator, Google, would be drawn into the IPR battle between Apple and vendors of Android based products.

"When HTC and other vendors decided to create Android-based products, they might have thought that Google would help them out if any patent issues came up. I'm wondering whether Google can really stay on the sidelines of this forever, not only with a view to Android but also its other open source projects - existing and future ones."