Our friends at PaidContent this morning reported that Apple filed a complaint earlier this week in a federal court in San Jose citing two patents and asking for an injunction against the Korean electronics maker. The patents in question are  8,074,172 and 8,086,604. The first is related to spelling and autocorrect. The second is described as a “universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system.”

What Apple is asking for in this case is unclear — as in whether they’re targeting the Galaxy Tab or Galaxy phones or any other product — since most of the court documents haven’t been made publicly available.

But it’s clear that Apple is not through trying to use the courts to punish Samsung for, as Apple put it, “slavishly copying” its iPhone and iPad products.

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Will devices be the next victim in the net neutrality debate?

According to the story, KT cut off Samsung’s Smart TVs Friday morning after a dispute over how much data those TVs consume. From the story:

The dispute has been festering for a while as KT insists smart TVs share the costs of quality maintenance of the internet as they tend to hog the networks, while TV makers argue they have no obligation to do so.

The argument is familiar. Remember this quote from Ed Whitacre when he was the CEO of AT&T?

“How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”

Or what about this quote from John Petter, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer business?

“We can’t give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect.”

But this angle of attacking a device seems new and troublesome. It’s unclear if this is a problem in Korea because Samsung is based there and KT feels like it might have less success going after a content provider like Netflix or Google. However, if other ISPs follow suit, would Roku, Boxee or even Smart TV makers such as LG or Vizio be next in line for some form of blocking?

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Tracking the hastags #MWC, #MWC12 and #MWC2012 revealed 13,331 tweets from 8,078 accounts (though some of the #MWC traffic related to college football’s Mountain West Conference). Samsung dominated the conversation with nearly 7,000 mentions. The next closest was Asus with less than 2,000 mentions.

Samsung had a heck of year, running neck-and-neck with Apple throughout 2011 for the title of smartphone king. It’s sure to build on that momentum at MWC this year. We may even see the first Galaxy smartphone with a quad-core processor.

Apple didn’t even make Anlytk’s top 10 list of Twitter buzz words, and it found that “Android” was mentioned 10 times more than “iPhone.” That’s hardly surprising, considering Apple’s proclivity for avoiding the big trade shows and making news at its own events.

With MWC kicking off in Barcelona on Feb. 27, there will be plenty of time for more anticipation to build. I’ll be at the show itself covering the news, but in the next few weeks we will have some preview posts letting you know just what to expect.

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Apple’s 37 million fourth quarter iPhone shipments were a far cry from the market leaders, however. Nokia still ruled the roost with 113.5 million handset shipments, while Samsung edged closer to grabbing the top spot with a 20 percent increase compared to the previous year, to a total of 97.6 million units shipped. Samsung succeeded by growing its smartphone sales, but also by increasing its feature phone shipment numbers in an otherwise soft market for those devices.

While Apple was the biggest gainer percentage-wise during the quarter, LG suffered the biggest drop,with a negative 42.2 percent change compared to the same period in 2010. Its total shipments were at 17.7 million for the year, which is on par with 2007 levels. LG definitely felt the hit of the waning feature phone market and was unable to do much to impress consumers with its smartphones, either.

Apple also ranked third overall in terms of  mobile phone shipments throughout the whole calendar year thanks to its fourth quarter results, with 93.2 iPhone shipments and year-over-year growth of 96.2 percent.

IDC predicts that the mobile phone market will continue to experience double-digit growth, despite only seeing 11.1 percent growth year-over-year in 2011, versus 18.7 percent growth between 2009 and 2010.

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In delivering the ruling, judge Andreas Mueller suggested that the court didn’t like Apple’s chances for maintaining the validity of the patent claim, saying that “Samsung has shown that it is more likely than not that the patent will be revoked because of a technology that was already on the market before the intellectual property had been filed for protection.”

It’s a win for Samsung, and one that will no doubt take the sting out of a ruling Tuesday that saw a Düsseldorf court uphold an injunction against the original Galaxy Tab 10.1. This injunction also would have applied to a technical patent, not design IP, which would’ve been much harder for Samsung to work around with simple software or hardware modifications.

Samsung’s bigger concern will still be the pending European Commission’s investigation related to its legal use of patents requiring fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing terms, which the EU regulatory body formally announced on Tuesday.

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Spending on the two types of semiconductors was essentially a tie in 2010, when wireless chips totaled $51.2 billion and spending on PC chips was $51.8 billion, according to IHS iSuppli’s calculations. But the growth in 2011 was all wireless, as you can see in the chart below.

The rise of mobile devices, which sold in record numbers last year, is responsible. “Wireless will continue to generate the most growth during the next two years,” said IHS iSuppli semiconductor analyst Wenlie Ye. “A substantial portion of the segment’s increase will be due to rising tablet sales, although mobile handsets like smartphones will continue to account for the lion’s share of semiconductor segment in the wireless area.”

And who’s spending the most on semiconductors for tablets? You won’t be too surprised to find out it’s Apple, the world’s biggest seller of touchscreen tablets. Last year, Apple spent $4.6 billion on chips for tablets, more than any other OEM. The next closest — though “close” is a relative term here — was Apple frenemy-in-chief, Samsung, which spent $603.2 million on tablet chips. HTC was in third with $199.2 million.

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Samsung has already sidestepped the initial injunction against the Tab 10.1 by releasing the Tab 10.1N in the German market, which features a redesigned case that avoids infringing on Apple’s community design patent. The ruling on Tuesday was based on a violation of German unfair competition law, Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents notes, and not on the original community design the injunction was issued for.

Mueller thinks that the win in the Düsseldorf appeals court is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, the ruling is obviously in Apple’s favor. On the other, it doesn’t necessarily apply to the redesigned Samsung 10-inch tablet, so there is no guarantee it will have any commercial impact for Apple. Also, the full-blown proceeding still has to happen, and that’s where the more important matter of Apple’s design patent will take place. Finally, Mueller says that in general, design-related lawsuits will probably have much less of an impact on the final outcome of the intellectual property value between the two companies than technical patent infringement claims, because they are relatively easy to work around.

In what may end up being a much more significant problem for Samsung, Tuesday also saw the announcement of a full-blown investigation of Samsung’s use of its patents, which fall under fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) licensing requirements. The European Commission had this to say in its formal press release on the issue:

The European Commission has opened a formal investigation to assess whether Samsung Electronics has abusively, and in contravention of a commitment it gave to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), used certain of its standard essential patent rights to distort competition in European mobile device markets, in breach of EU antitrust rules.

Samsung will now face a formal inquiry regarding its claims of infringement on patents deemed to be essential in the EU. The action was likely prompted by Samsung’s infringement claims against Apple, which it went after in multiple EU courts regarding patents carrying FRAND licensing requirements.

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While some day in the future we could all have our own personal home battery systems combined with rooftop solar panels, Japanese home owners could get these goodies sooner, rather than later. Consumer electronics giant Kyocera is working with battery system developer Nichicon Corporation to package up Kyocera’s solar rooftop gear and its energy management system, with Nichicon’s lithium ion home battery systems, to sell an all-in-one product to Japanese home owners.

Kyocera says there’s been a growing demand for Japanese homes to be able to generate and store their own power following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters last year. Kyocera says it’ll start selling the package this Summer in Japan. The battery itself will be made by Samsung, and Nichicon provides the battery management system, storage unit and power inverter.

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On Friday, IHS iSuppli is the latest to weigh in. The firm says that while Apple came in first place in the last calendar quarter of 2011 in smartphone sales with 37 million, Samsung actually took the crown of world’s largest smartphone vendor of the year with 95 million shipped. (That’s not “sold,” so this isn’t a great way to compare, as we’ve previously discussed, but it’s what we’ve got.) Apple sold 93 million iPhones during the year.

IHS iSuppli is basing its Samsung numbers on information gathered when the company announced its quarterly earnings earlier Friday. I asked iSuppli analyst Wayne Lam how he arrived at the number, and he said he was basing it off the “approximately 30 percent growth” figure Samsung publicly announced. He interpreted that as “under 30 percent but over 27 percent.”

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Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents was in attendance at the court’s announcement of the ruling on Friday and said that Judge Andreas Voss didn’t specify any particular reason for the decision. The first ruling against Samsung last week also didn’t include a reason. Mueller said at that time that the reasons could either be that Apple had been found not to infringe the patent or that Samsung’s rights in exerting the patent had been deemed exhausted, which would result in Apple’s being granted a license by default. The same reasons could also be applied to Friday’s ruling.

For Samsung, this is definitely a setback, but it isn’t the end of the road; the company still has three other 3G/UMTS patents at issue in separate complaints filed with the Mannheim court. As long as the reasons behind the dismissals of these two lawsuits aren’t somehow related to all the patents in question, it could still claim a victory on one or more of those remaining.

Samsung could also still appeal the decision, and given that it, like Apple, posted record earnings for its most recently completed quarter, there is no financial barrier preventing it from doing so. With two companies at the top of their game slugging it out in the legal arena, there is little incentive for either to stop.

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