Smartphone Competition Situation And Development Trends Research From Patent Perspective

Smartphone technology competition has been more fierce and developed more rapidly, Patent litigation has been a common feature of the mobile phone industry for many years. Historically this litigation tended to focus on the core technologies involved in providing traditional mobile voice telephony services such as radio transmission, network management and speech compression technologies. More recently, the aggressive convergence of cell phone and mobile computing technology in smartphones has seen the focus of this litigation broaden across a wider range of technologies. This article used patent bibliometrics and patent citation analysis to demonstrate Smartphone’s state of competition and development tendency in field.This article used patent data both in Derwent Innovation Index database and collected from patent litigation to analysis the competition state with information visualization method, and compared six Smartphone company from patent number and patent citation to indicate their position in Smartphone technology field. Using patent co-citation network, key technologies and patents with most litigations were found in the same time.The results are as follows:the number of Smartphone patents has grown rapidly by the year, and most of the high-ranking patentees are main Smartphone manufactures. Although patent numbers and citations differed from six companies, apple holds the most important position in Smartphone field for its high citations and high H-index, and becomes the most potential competitor. Meanwhile, there are four main technology clusters in Smartphone litigation field, which are touch screen, mobile data acquisition, mobile data transfer and object-oriented operation system. Apple not only has key techniques in touch screen cluster, but also occupies the core rule in Smartphone litigation network. Next, this article studied Smartphone competition strategies through case study of Apple Inc., that are fundamental patents strategy, patent licensing exchanges strategy and patent litigation strategy, and to predict future Smartphone technology competition tendency, which are human-computer interaction technology will become R&D focus, providing intelligent platform of integrated application technology services will become hot topics, and strengthening key technology patents in the overall field will become the focal points.