
Samsung sued over battery management algorithms
Samsung Electronics is being sued in Europe by a patent management company over algorithms for battery management.
K-mizra, a small patent agency based in Los Angeles, holds the patent on behalf of Dutch research lab TNO. The patent enables a feature in early versions of the Android operating system that predicts remaining battery time.
K-mizra issued a statement saying it filed a suit in the Dusseldorf Regional Court but the company’s site subsequently became unavailable which may indicate that there are issues. Google as the developer of Android could well be dragged into the suit.
The patent, ep2174201b1, describes a method of predicting the power consumption of a battery-powered mobile terminal used for carrying out a sequence of user activities. This is adaptive, measuring the power consumption of the terminal while carrying out the series of user activities and deriving the power consumption of each activity. The algorithm takes into account this activity to obtain the power consumption of the sequence.
Last year K-mizra acquired patents from Sharp around printer technology and sued Toshiba, Lexmark and HP.
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