• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, June 14, 2011

Ending a protracted legal battle between two mobile giants, Nokia and Apple have entered into a patent-license agreement settling all patent litigation between them. "Nokia won an almost two-year patent dispute with Apple, as the world's largest mobile-phone makers reached a settlement that awards a one-time payment and royalties to the Finnish handset maker," reports Bloomberg.

"There's no question Apple lost the legal battle that pitted its significant intellectual property holdings against Nokia's even deeper patent portfolio," writes CNNMoney.com. Indeed, "Nokia emerges as a clear winner from the fight," Sami Sarkamies, analyst at Nordea Bank AB, said in a note to clients on Tuesday.

"Beyond the immediate news, there are also longer-term issues to consider," GigaOm reminds us. "First, there's the effect on Apple. I think those are minimal: the company has huge cash reserves and now has ended almost all possibility of further litigation from Nokia in this area."

There's also the impact on Nokia and its image. "While the payments may help the company right itself temporarily (remember, the company says the money is only going to shore up its dismal Q2 results) they may betray a deeper issue -- that it is becoming reliant on others," GigaOm adds.

For better or worse, therefore, Nokia may very well shift its focus to Google and its Android operating system. As Florian Mueller, an intellectual property analyst, tell The New York Times, Android is technologically similar to Apple's iPhone operating system, and may invite a legal challenge from Nokia.

"The fact that Apple caved, when it's pretty aggressive about intellectual property ... shows that Nokia has one of the best patent portfolios in the industry," writes Business Insider. "Nokia has said that one of the ways in which it's going to try to make more money is by using that patent portfolio to get license fees. This is a decisive early win for that."