Sanyo has made a statement about the newly broken partnership it had with Nokia to co-develop and market CDMA handsets. The AFP reports that disagreements between the companies centered around intellectual property rights:
"The plan of setting up a joint venture with Nokia in CDMA mobile handsets is over, as both sides saw difficulty making concessions in sharing patent rights and other company assets," Sanyo Electric spokesman Akihiro Oiwa said Thursday.
Nokia plans to concentrate its CDMA efforts on North America where it will offer new "Nokia branded" models such two it just licensed from Pantech. Both Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS use CDMA networks, making the potential customer base more than half of the national US market.
Qualcomm has stated that this is not expected to hurt sales of CDMA handsets as Nokia has never been a major player in the market.
[via FierceWireless]