Love them, hate them, think whatever you will of HTC but they are the largest manufacturer of Windows Mobile smartphones. That said, a company called Saxon is claiming that HTC, along with Nokia and Research in Motion, have violated two of their patents. Saxon is asking the International Trade Commission to ban violating devices.

The patents in question, according to WMPowerUser, involve “handheld wireless communication devices”, “smart phones”, “cellular telephones” and “television remote controls” and cover features such as “a keypad monitor with keypad activity based activation” and “a device and method for inter-processor communication using mailboxes owned by processor devices.”

The patents were owned by AMD, but Saxon had purchased the patents from AMD.

Other than owning the patents, it doesn’t seem like Saxon had any products released. Perhaps this could be a patent troll.

Without HTC, RIM, and Nokia, the USA smartphone market would be left to a closed iPhone OS limited to Apple and the Android OS by Google.