News

The Sendo Orange buck stops ... with Texas Instruments!

Phone maker Sendo is still hoping to take Microsoft into a court room, but in the meantime, the surprise news is a Smartphone licensing deal - not with Microsoft, but with Texas Instruments. Is it related to the Microsoft suit?

The boring part of the news is that Sendo has withdrawn its injunction against Orange. It won't be boring for Orange, because Sendo has agreed to pay somewhat towards Orange's legal costs. But why has Sendo not announced this?

The answer is that it has been able to establish that it has patent rights over the design of the Orange SPV, a rather better way.

Background: Sendo originally set up a joint venture with Microsoft to design the Z100, and then later launched a lawsuit against its partner, cancelling the deal.

Sendo's suit explained how it pulled out of the deal a day before Microsoft moved to have Sendo wound up for non-fulfilment of contract. It blamed Microsoft for the delay in filling the contract on Microsoft, for failing to deliver the operating system on time. It also said that Microsoft gave trade secrets to HTC (High Tech Computer) in Taiwan, enabling HTC to build the Orange SPV smartphone.

Then, earlier this year, Sendo asked for an injunction to stop Orange from selling the SPV in the UK, claiming patent infringements. So why has it dropped the Orange suit?

Here's our best guess:

The trail appears to go from Sendo to Orange, from Orange to Taiwanese hand-held manufacturer HTC and from HTC to Texas Instruments. TI makes the chips inside the HTC "Canary" design, which is what Orange has been selling up to now, and also the chips inside the new "Tanager" Smartphone which Orange has now launched.

A day or so ago, Texas Instruments made a low-key announcement that it was going to pay Sendo for patent licences.

The announcement said nothing about lawsuits against Orange or Microsoft. Instead, it looked forward positively, as good American corporate statements should do, of course, to "application-rich Sendo smartphones using TI's high-performance, power-efficient OMAP processors."

TI further stated that, as a result of the license agreement, it would not be changing its prices for OMAP devices. And it hinted at new Sendo models: "Smartphones using TI's OMAP processors and Sendo's technology will enable a broad range of capabilities such as multimedia messaging, interactive gaming, video-on-demand, digital music, high-end graphics and more."

Sendo, as everybody should realise, is going to launch a Symbian based smartphone on a Nokia Series 60 licence. That launch will be made somewhere between the end of August and the beginning of October.

With the lawsuit against Orange over, and a little "compensation for Orange's inconvenience" paid, the way is clear for Orange to take on the new Sendo phone, if it likes. Interestingly, Sendo phones are sold by Orange in several of its territories - but not in the UK.

And of course, possibly most important, the way is now clear for Sendo to go into the court room against Microsoft, and show a legally watertight claim to intellectual property inside the SPV.

Whether Sendo can show that Microsoft gave this IP to HTC who then gave it to Texas instruments, remains to be seen. But it seems Microsoft can not claim that there is no Sendo IP in the SPV.