Samsung prepares a preemptive strike in its war with Apple

You might remember Samsung vowing to continue its fight with Apple a couple of days ago. Well it’s just struck a big preemptive blow.

The South Korean electronics giant has announced that it will take Apple to court if it launches an LTE phone in the near future. The announcement comes as Samsung looks to strengthen its ties to US carriers in a bid to avoid a repeat of the trial that saw it ordered to pay US1.049-billion in damages to the Cupertino-based giant.

“Samsung has been in talks with major U.S. carriers to jointly develop modified design technology. This will be effective, though we can’t unveil more details for the time being,” a Samsung official told Korea Times.

At the moment Thomson-Reuters estimates that Samsung has around 12% of the world’s LTE patents, while Nokia has 18.9%. Qualcomm meanwhile lays claim to 12.5% and Ericsson 11.6%. That means, it might be difficult for Samsung to conclusively prove that Apple is infringing on its patents in particular.

Samsung CEO Lee Kun-hee meanwhile provided perhaps the most frank and honest assessments of the patent war between the two tech giants. “Be well prepared to cope with it,” he said. We suggest taking that advice on board because this isn’t going to go away any time soon.