Microsoft scored another win in its campaign to strike patent-licensing deals with the makers of smartphones and tablets using Google’s Android software.
Samsung, the largest maker of Android products, will pay Microsoft an undisclosed fee for every smartphone and tablet it makes that uses Google’s free operating system. Previously, Taiwan’s HTC, the second-largest maker of phones using Android, struck a patent-licensing deal with Microsoft.
The largest patent beneficiary in the radio layer is the leader in that technology, Qualcomm. The company collects about $20 on every smartphone produced, Mr. Smith estimates.
The second layer was media technology, allowing music and video to play on modern smartphones. Those patent-licensing fees are about $3 to $5 a phone, and go to a variety of companies, Mr. Smith said.
The next layer, he said, is the software layer – the computing operating systems that animate smartphones. The companies that have been working on that technology for years, like Apple and Microsoft, went first and developed software ideas that Android builds upon, according to Microsoft and Apple. And Android uses Java software technology, developed by its Sun unit, Oracle contends.
