HTC lost its patent infringement complaint against Apple in October following an International Trade Commission (ITC) administrative law judge’s finding that there was no violation by the company of four HTC patents, which include technologies for power management and phone dialing. 

It seems like the Cupertino-based tech outfit is still on the legal winning track in its patent battles with the Taiwanese smartphone and tablet maker, as it won a ban on certain HTC mobile devices in the US. 

According to The Verge, the US ITC ruled in favour of Apple in its patent case against HTC and banned the import as well as the sale of some of HTC’s  Android-powered mobile devices. This include the Evo 4G and Droid Incredible smartphones. This ban comes into effect on 19 April 2012, giving HTC plenty of time to address the issues. 

The two Apple data tapping patents HTC was found to be in contravention of, deals with an invention that marks up phone numbers and other types of formatted data within an unstructured document such as an email for instance, allowing the users to bring up other programs to interact with or process that data. 

In plain English it means that when you receive an email (unstructured document) from someone that contains their cellphone number (formatted data), you are able to tap on the number in order to save it to your contacts or to phone (program interacting with formatted data - dialler) that person.

Grace Lei, general counsel of HTC issued the following statement: “We are gratified that the Commission affirmed the judge’s initial determination on the ‘721 and ‘983 patents, and reversed its decision on the ‘263 patent and partially on the ‘647 patent. We are very pleased with the determination and we respect it. However, the ‘647 patent is a small UI experience and HTC will completely remove it from all of our phones soon.”

In other patent related news Samsung recently turned its losing streak against Apple around, as  the Korean tech firm is able to sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Australia following an Australian federal court’s decision to lift a preliminary sales injunction imposed by a lower court.