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Apple has sued Nokia for allegedly infringing on 13 patents, less than two months after the Finnish cellphone giant charged in a lawsuit that Apple’s iPhone violated
10 of its patents.

The counter suit Friday claimed that Nokia was attempting to copy the iPhone and its heralded user interface to help it stem Apple’s lead in the market for smartphones.

“Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours,” said Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel, in a statement.

The patents Apple alleges Nokia is infringing deal with, among other things: Connecting a phone to a computer, teleconferencing, menus on a touch screen, power conservation in chips, and “pattern and color abstraction in a graphical user interface”. The company also denies Nokia’s claims of patent infringement.

Nokia sued Apple in late October claiming that Apple infringed on patents covering wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption. Nokia said it had signed licenses with other companies that allowed them to use the technology that Apple was using in all its iPhones.

“The basic principle in the mobile industry is that those companies who contribute technology development to establish standards create intellectual property, which others then need to compensate for,” said Ikka Rahnasto, vice president of legal and intellectual property at Nokia, in a preparedstatement.

“By refusing to agree to appropriate terms for Nokia’s intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia’s innovation,” Rahnasto said.

The lawsuits in a federal court in Delaware come as Nokia tries to retain its status as the world’s largest maker of cellphones, and as its market share in the profitable smartphone sector shrinks in the face of competition from the iPhone and other challengers.

Finnish mobile handset major Nokia will fund four Indian software developers under its $10-million joint open screen project fund with Adobe for developing multi-screen infotainment applications, a company official said Monday.

Infotainment applications are information-based media content programmes.

The Indian firms and content aggregators, which will develop the four applications, are Bollywood Hungama, Eros Bollywood, India Today and Aaj Tak Videos.

“The applications, selected out of 900 entries from 60 countries across the world, will be available to consumers through our Ovi Store later this month,” Nokia India managing director D. Shivakumar said at the Forum Nokia Developer Conference-2009 here.

Nokia also released the new software development kit for its series 40 mass market mobile devices to help developers create applications and services for the high-volume feature phone market worldwide.

The kit will also feature support for Indian regional languages such as Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi Tamil and Telugu.

“Mobile users are consuming more and more content daily. Considering that the next billion mobile users will be from emerging markets like India, our developers have the opportunity to not only shape local and global consumer mobile experiences, but also lead the mobile applications ecosystem,” Shivakumar noted.

Nokia has about 180,000 local developers to leverage off its investments and the market opportunity to innovate and create new revenue opportunities for themselves.

“With the internet entering into the core of mobile experience, we see huge opportunities for local developers in shaping the future of mobile services,” Forum Nokia vice-president Purnima Kochikar said on the occasion.

Nokia also showcased at the conference its latest Linux-based Maemo 5 OS (operating system) that will help deliver a true PC like experience.

The company will market and distribute applications developed on both Maemo and Symbian platforms through its Ovi Store globally.

About 650 developers from across the country attended the conference.

Nokia’s open screen project fund has been designed to accelerate development of applications, content and services that leverage the Adobe Flash Platform and run across mobile, desktop and consumer electronics handsets.

Yesterday’s in-wall USB charger hackery might have inspired plenty of you to take up tools and start the USB power revolution, but if you own an iPod or iPhone and just a smidgen of common sense, you might wanna look at this first. The DLO WallDock is a teeny tiny charger that plugs into those familiar standard wall sockets, and its designed so that your iDevice leans back when connected, turning it into a neat (and wireless) substitute for your regular dock. We still wouldn’t sacrifice the $25 asking price at the altar of cable freedom, but the more important question is, would you?