After a Month Delay U.S. Customs Lets HTC Handsets Trickle Through

From DailyTech: HTC Corp. (TPE:2498) had some happy news to report Monday. Its handsets -- including the Evo 4G LTE and the One X -- finally began to be inspected and cleared U.S. Customs and Border Patrol checkpoints.

HTC, based out of Taoyuan, Taiwan, has suffered deep losses to revenue at the hands of U.S. Customs. U.S. Customs seized the handsets after Apple, Inc. (AAPL), a U.S. smartphone manufacturer, won a preliminary injunction against HTC from the U.S. International Trade Commission. The injunction dealt with a single patent on "data-tapping" -- U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647. Data-tapping involves converting strings such as phone numbers to actionable links.

The One X and Evo 4G LTE were shipped with a fix, which implement a new feature not found in Apple's iOS, dubbed "App Associations. Despite the workaround removing the infringing properties from core Android apps, the HTC handsets were held up at Customs for over a month, with the ban first taking effect on April 19.

With the leisurely pace of the review, HTC faced major revenue losses. The U.S. is HTC's biggest market, and the world's second largest smartphone market. HTC, like Apple, manufactures its smartphones in China. Some have suggested that U.S. manufacturing could be used as a workaround, but this would be problematic given HTC's minimal U.S. engineering presence and the cost of finding local plants and retooling them. Thus HTC remains largely at the mercy of Customs.

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