Blackberry Settles Patent Dispute With Seacrest's Company Typo, Stopping Keyboard Sales for Smaller Mobile Devices

BlackBerry Ltd. settled its dispute with Ryan Seacrest's Typo Products, agreeing to let the "American Idol" host to sell his smartphone keyboards only to larger mobile devices.

Reuters reported that BlackBerry settled patent dispute with Seacrest's Typo under terms that stops the keyboard company to sell for mobile devices that has screens smaller than 7.9 inches.

This means Typo Products can only sell for devices with larger screens. BlackBerry's patent dispute settlement still allows Typo to sell for Apple devices like iPad Air and iPad Mini. There are other details of the settlement that are not divulged to the public yet.

A US District court sanctioned Typo in February for violating an injunction that stops it from selling the iPhone keyboard case that BlackBerry claimed to have infringed on its patents.

Since BlackBerry is losing its market share to Apple's iPhone and other mobile devices with Google's OS, the keyboard remains to be its key selling point. 

Typo is co-founded by host Ryan Seacrest. It is a company that sells iPhone keyboard case for only $99. It turns your touch screen device into an instant querty phone.  This slip-on physical keyboard makes it more convenient for other iPhone users to type on their phones. These products became more popular when Ryan Seacrest's name was affiliated with it as the co-founder. It mainly creates keyboards for iPhone 5 and 5S. It offered a preorder keyboard for iPhone 6 last December that quickly sold out.

Typo debuted in January 2014 and was sued for infringement by BlackBerry shortly after its release. Another version was made in December for iPhone 6. BlackBerry again filed a lawsuit stating that the product infringed its copyright.