Apple’s initial legal victory over rival HTC in a patent infringement suit could pave the way for Apple to collect high royalties from devices running Google Android, according to one analysis.

Mike Abramsky with RBC Capital Markets believes that Apple has the upper hand over HTC, which is a smaller handset maker with a limited portfolio of intellectual property. As such, Apple could potentially push for an injunction and ask the U.S. International Trade Commission to bar the import of HTC handsets.

Instead, Abramsky believes it’s more likely that Apple will try to establish a high royalty precedent on Android devices. He said the iPhone maker could garner a deal that’s similar to or even higher than the $5 per unit that Microsoft collects on HTC Android devices.

From Apple Insider

$5 a unit. Wow.  But Apple has some remarkable technology covered by the patents at issue. For example

When the handler 44 requests a facsimile transmission, for example, the real-time function block issues commands to start the real-time engine and install the various modules that are needed for it to function as a virtual telephone. Binary facsimile image data is transferred to the real-time engine via the FIFO buffers, where it is encoded as PCM data which is further encoded according to the transport medium over which it is to be transmitted. If the adapter is connected to a telephone line, for example, these signals can be encoded as 16-bit pulse-code modulated (PCM) samples, and forwarded directly to the adapter 36 via the serial driver 42 . Alternatively, if the transport medium is an ISDN line, the modem signals are encoded as mulaw-companded 8-bit PCM signals. The different types of encoding are stored in different tables, and the appropriate one to be used by the real-time engine is installed by the real-time function block during the initial configuration of the engine and/or designated by the API 48 at the time the command to transform the data is issued.

Too stunning. There should be a Nobel prize in there – at least. Take a look.

All the recent progress in cell phone handsets has come from companies that defied the BOM process. Instead of trying to sell items into the “stack”, RIM and Apple both have been able to imagine the handset as a complete product and innovate. Google is also changing the game by bearing down on what services can be delivered over a mobile device. These companies are in the business of creating products for end users and not in the business of selling parts to buyers of components. If you create products, BOM issues don’t go away, but they do not dominate.

The BOM process can dominate even in what appear to be more open markets. In a previous note, I discussed Dell’s efforts to sell against Apple to the people and businesses found at SXSW. Even though, as Jay Pinkert points out, Dell has improved design for cases, it labors under a disadvantage against Apple, because Apple can do end-to-end product design and Dell is forced to live at least in part in the BOM process world. Apple is not only designing the case, they control the operating system, the windowing environment, the middleware, and they can strongly influence and package application software. So Apple can look at what a conference organizer or musician wants or maybe what they will want once someone shows it to them, and try to design a product that will be compelling in totality. A company like Dell is constrained to delivering what is ultimately just a vehicle for vanilla Windows (or Linux) – a component of a stack. While the packaging can be improved, they cannot reach the customer in the same way that Apple can. Musicians and conference organizers and marketing agents want to have an aesthetically pleasing communications/graphics design machine or email/composing system or presentation device or some combination of these. None of them demand Vista or OS/10 or an intel processor or any of the technical parts. Of course, the traditional downfall of companies like Apple is that they grow an internal BOM process that transforms their own engineering staff into integrators and parts vendors.