teecee.....most of the interaction was/is at arms length with the exception of the initial license agreement in which IDCC was threatening to spoil the original US launch of the iPhone....and then when IDCC had to help fix the 3G access stratum stack handoff issues that the IFX baseband was having. Those things were not particularly pleasant for Apple
So in answering I would say that I don't think Apple has any particular leg up....both they and google...and the others were pretty deep into the Nortel dd, and both have bolstered their internal and external resources for this type of activity.
jmo
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