Apple and Samsung drop more claims ahead of July 30 trial

According to court documents released today, Apple is no longer pursuing infringement claims against Samsung's Acclaim, Nexus S and Sidekick cell phones while Samsung is dismissing its claims pertaining to U.S. Patent No. 6,928,604, reports Macworld.

Apple added some of the now-dropped handsets to its design patent infringement case in June 2011 as both parties piled on assertions in a claims arms-race. The iPhone maker claimed that Samsung's smartphones copied the look and feel of the iPhone.

Samsung's asserted '604 patent for a "Turbo encoding/decoding device and method for processing frame data according to QoS" describes technology related to CDMA wireless data. The property was being leveraged against certain Apple iDevices that sported cellular functionality.

The paring down of claims is in response to Judge Lucy Koh's continued requests to shrink the case in efforts to expedite a ruling. In June, Judge Koh limited each party to 125 exhibits and 25 hours of argument time.

Most recently the companies trimmed their cases in early July when Apple dropped the remaining claim from its U.S. Patent No. 7,663,607 for "multitouch touchscreen" and other trade dress claims. On the same day Samsung brought down the number of asserted claims from six patents-in-suit from 15 to 9.

Monday's filing comes one week after Apple CEO Tim Cook met with Samsung executives as part of court-directed mediation intended to solve the dispute out of court. The meeting yielded no actionable results, however, and it is unlikely that the two companies will settle before the jury trial begins.

The Apple v. Samsung court trial set to begin next week when the two tech heavyweights meet in court for jury selection on Tuesday.