The Finnish provider HMD Global has temporarily stopped direct sales of most Nokia smartphones in Germany as a result of a patent dispute over a voice codec for Voice-over-LTE. Only the latest models are still officially available at the moment.
As reported by Android Authority, among others, HMD Global has temporarily put the sale of most Nokia smartphones in Germany, Switzerland and other European countries on hold. The background is a patent dispute with the company VoiceAgesEVS. HMD allegedly infringes patents with its devices because it does not pay license fees for the use of a specific language code for VoLTE telephony.
VoiceAgesEVS is actually just a patent administrator and is supposed to get various smartphone providers to pay fees for using the EVS audio codec (Enhanced Voice Services), which was developed a few years ago by the Canadian company VoiceAges and is now used extensively for VoLTE calls .
Devices with EVS are no longer available for the time being
In a statement, HMD Global stated that by the time the ongoing legal proceedings were completed, it had ensured that none of the Nokia smartphones offered and distributed in Germany had EVS support. Ultimately, this means that most Nokia-branded smartphones are currently no longer available through the Nokia and HMD online stores.
The existing stocks are still available in retail, so that only in the official Nokia store are no more devices available. Only the two recently introduced Nokia G11 and Nokia G21 models are still listed in the store, although according to HMD Global they already come from the factory without EVS support.
It is unclear whether HMD Global is currently also not making new deliveries to retailers of other devices that theoretically infringe VoiceAgesEVS patents.
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