HTC handsets to be banned in US next year after Apple UI legal case succeeds

Christmas time is apparently the season of goodwill, but there's likely to be no cards exchanged between HTC and Apple over the next few days.

The Cupertino company has just won a patent infringement case against HTC (patent #5,946,647, to be exact), leading to the United States International Trade Commission ordering all sales in the US of HTC handsets running Android 1.6 - 2.2 to cease next year.

The patent in question centres on what Apple calls Data Detectors. These allow iPhone users to navigate straight to the dialler, Safari, or Maps when they click on a highlighted number or address in messages, notes, etc.

Naturally, this isn't exactly a 'core' hardware feature, and HTC has said in a statement that it will "completely remove it from all of our phones soon".

It is, however, a feature found in quite a few Android phones, so we'd expect it to mysteriously vanish from other 'droid vendors' handsets shortly, too.

In the unlikely event that HTC forgets to remove the feature - maybe the New Year's party was like something from The Hangover - then expect the Nexus One, T-Mobile G2, Evo 4G, and other older handsets to disappear from US shelves on April 19th.