Apple is known to be a bit of a patent bully, with its habit to patent whatever ideas they manage to gather regardless of their chances of being implemented. Samsung, on the other hand, has had to pay millions of dollars in damage for patent infringement, and has finally started filing a lot more patents.
But guess what, it wasn’t Samsung or even Apple that filed the most number of international patents in 2014. It was, in fact, China’s own Huawei! The company isn’t particularly renown for its innovation, which is perhaps why this report (by the World Intellectual Property Organization) happens to be as astonishing as it is.
Some of the most popular product launches by Huawei last year have been the Ascend P7 (now known as the P7), Honor 6, Honor 6 Plus and of course, the Mate 7. While none of the aforementioned products offered anything substantially new, the Mate 7 was certainly lauded for the one-touch fingerprint sensor, among other things.
Huawei also has one of the best looking smartwatches in the pipeline for this year, something that one would imagine was designed last year (and thus, applicable patents filed in 2014). The smartwatch is due in some time from now, and we’re pretty keen on knowing how much it costs (hope it isn’t going to be too much).
That isn’t a lot of product launches (of course, there were more that didn’t really grab the headlines much), but for some reason, Huawei seems to have filed a lot of patents. I’m not really sure if Huawei would like to carry that tag, since innovation isn’t really directly proportional to the number of patents you file.
Are you forgetting that Huawei is more than just phones? Most of those patents probably has to do with network infrastructure / next generation telecommunications technologies. If it weren’t for Huawei most countries wouldn’t be able to enjoy having blazing fast internet on their phones because their carrier would have to turn to Ericsson, NSN and even Sagem