According to the announcment of the analyst of Oppenheimer, Yair Reine, the lawsuit filed by Apple not long ago against the Taiwanese company HTC, is just the culmination of a series of threats designed to struggle with competitors. According to the data, early in January of this year, Apple held a series of talks with mobile phone manufacturers, where the company had expressed “growing dissatisfaction with” the alleged violation of its rights of ownership to the ideas set in the iPhone.

Though these negotiations were conducted in private atmosphere, it became known that their tone was rather rude. At the same time these rivals of Apple in the market of mobile technologies, according to Reiner, mostly tried not to touch the sphere of touch technology, the use of which would really irritate Apple. After all, last year in January, the COO of Apple Tim Cook warned that the company will use all available tools in its arsenal to struggle against the violations of its patents.

For example, until recently there were virtually no mobile devices supporting multi-touch in the U.S. market , which were not produced by Apple. Palm Pre  was an exception, which, according to Reiner, is not perceived as a competitor to iPhone. Recently, however, the situation began to change not in favor of Apple. Two high-quality smartphones, Motorola Droid and HTC Eris Android,  have appeared in the market to compete with multi-touch technology.

Naturally, this caused Apple’s resentment, rightly fearful that the smartphone iPhone will soon lose its status of “unique” device supporting multi-touch functionality, at least in the American market. According to Reiner, the leading phone manufacturers could regard Apple’s silence as a sign of assent, and flood the market with many multi-touch devices, especially after Google also implemented similar functionality in its Android smartphone Nexus One. Many experts are inclined to believe that Apple’s lawsuit against HTC has another real purpose that is to somehow precipitate Google, whose Android operating system and smart phones based on it are becoming a real threat to the iPhone.

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