Samsung fails to stall Galaxy Nexus sales ban

Samsung's bad luck in the US courts continues after Judge Lucy Koh refused to delay a ban on its Galaxy Nexus smartphones.

The South Korean electronics giant tried to get a stay on the preliminary injunction won by Apple while it appealed the decision, but Judge Koh was having none of it.

The iPhone maker was granted the sales ban after claiming the Galaxy Nexus, which is Google's flagship Android mobe, infringes four patents. The injunction was imposed on the strength of one of these designs, known as the 604 patent, which relates to searching for information via a single interface and using heuristics to identify the best results to show. Imagine typing a contact's name into a box and have hits in your address book, files and email appear.

"The court is not persuaded that Samsung has raised any substantial questions concerning infringement or that Samsung has shown a likelihood of success on non-infringement on appeal," the judge said in her ruling, adding that she didn't think Samsung had much chance of declaring Apple's patent invalid either.

Google has pulled the Nexus from its US Play store, and the phone has been changed from "for sale" to "coming soon" with no other information.

Google and Samsung are said to be working on releasing a patch for the Nexus' software to address the infringement allegations. The pair are also expected to go to the US Patent and Trademark Office to look for a re-examination of Apple's 604 patent in the hopes of getting it declared invalid, most probably on the basis that the idea of a unified search interface was around long before Apple patented it.

Google and Samsung both declined to comment. ®