Apple wants the Ice Cream-bearing Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone that Samsung worked on with Google banned from the United States because it allegedly infringes four strong Apple technical patents - none of this squishy design stuff like before.
Apple quietly asked a district court in California for the preliminary injunction last Thursday as part of a new lawsuit.
Patent watcher Florian Mueller calls the patents the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
In Florian's metaphor, they might to unleash pestilence, war, famine and death on Android 4.0 as it comes from Google - no Samsung features have been added to the so-called stock Android - giving the suit a potentially more crippling arc that implicates all Ice Cream Sandwich widgets.
It's the closest Apple has gotten to taking on Google directly and if Google removes any of the challenged features it's as good as an admission of an infringement taint, Florian observes.
The patents include the "data tapping" patent that caused the ITC to order an import ban against HTC and HTC to immediately deep-six the offending feature - well, it does infringe at the OS level; a Siri- and unified search-related patent striking into Google's home turf; a slide-to-unlock patent that Florian says "profoundly" worried the head of the Taiwanese government; and a word completion patent that speeds touchscreen text entry, another search-y kinda thing.
Apple already has one suit pending against Samsung in California and Florian figures they'll be consolidated.
He also thinks Apple's made further charges against a broader flotilla of Samsung products in the second suit's unseen main complaint.
And he thinks that this time through Apple could get the preliminary injunction it wants. The court shouldn't be able to refuse - like it did the first time - on the basis of timeliness since it filed suit at the same time it asked for a preliminary injunction and it just got three of the four patents in the last few months. It's also offered the court market data substantiating the switching cost of Android-to-iOS migration as part of its customer-poaching allegations.
There could be a decision in a few months and a trial this summer.
For a fuller discussion see http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/02/apple-requests-us-preliminary.html.