You read that right, sales of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the U.S. have been temporarily banned after the court granted Apple's request for a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Nexus in their ongoing patent lawsuit.
As soon as Apple posts a bond of approximately $96 million (the estimated costs for Samsung should the court decide this injunction was wrongly applied) the ban will go into effect. Samsung can of course appeal this ruling and that could happen as early as next week, which could potentially bring this to a very abrupt end. If Samsung is unable to convince the court to reverse this decision the ban will remain in effect until the trial is concluded.
There are four total patents at issue in this case. The first is the same one that proved problematic for HTC that allows the device to identify text or numbers to pull up a relevant menu or action. The second is basically word prediction for a touchscreen keyboard. The third is the ever popular slide-to-unlock patent and rounding out the quartet is a patent for a single search interface that allows the device to search a variety of sources both on and off the device.
Now those are very simplistic descriptions of these patents, but I am nevertheless baffled as always that not only were these patents granted in the first place, but that a judge finds them to be compelling. And to be clear this does not bode well for Samsung in the trial as the standards for granting a preliminary injunction are fairly high, requiring that the judge believed that the patents were likely valid and that Samsung had indeed infringed upon them and is causing Apple irreparable harm by having the Galaxy Nexus on sale.
There has been no official comment from Samsung as of this posting, but we'll keep you updated as any new information becomes available.
