Comment Re:Patents? (Score 1) 112
Reportedly, Qualcomm used to file patents to cover only a part of the features of their hardware. The rest was kept as trade secret. As a result, the competitors still needed to pay the patent licenses for Qualcomm IP, but the missing info prevented them to produce competitive components easily.
This is why choosing WCDMA for 3G destroyed Qualcomm's European competitors. In the end, It worked so well that Qualcomm folded its own 3GPP2 organisation, because the supposedly rival 3GPP standards were much more lucrative.