Charles Golvin: I believe it says more about the market itself. We are undergoing a radical shift in computing and these devices frame the future landscape of competition -- not just for devices but for applications, content, services and commerce. There are monumental stakes involved, well beyond the billions in revenue from the sale of the gadgets themselves. 

Mark McKenna: The smartphone wars are an indictment of the patent system generally. There are too many patents, and those patents often have fuzzy and overlapping boundaries. The big companies eventually will find a way to settle most of these claims, likely by engaging in lots of cross-licensing. But the situation is much harder for newer and/or smaller firms who want to get into this space. To do so, you need to have or buy a ton of patents (or at least some really important ones), and you need to be prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on litigation. That's not good for the industry or for consumers. It's really only good for lawyers.

Bill Panagos: Both. The U.S. patent process is set up to reward innovation and risk-taking to encourage "the progress of the useful arts and sciences." As all economies converge into the global economy, the patent process will increasingly become the defining factor in domination of world markets, as well as in leadership in technological endeavors.