Nokia shoe drops. RIM next?

Given that Nokia seems to be going nowhere pretty fast (cool new phones - yup.  nifty Windows Mobile - yup.  People caring - not so much), it was just a matter of time before they started going down the patent route, and I guess the first shoe just dropped. 
per The Verge,

Nokia just announced that it's suing HTC, RIM, and Viewsonic for patent infringement in the US and Germany. All told, there are 45 patent in the various lawsuits, covering what Nokia says are proprietary technologies — i.e., not industry standards. Specifically, Nokia's patents cover hardware features like antennas, radios, and power management, as well as software features like multitasking, navigation, app stores, retrieving email attachments on mobile, "conversational" message display, dynamic menus, and certain types of data encryption.

The patents in question makes these cases slightly different than Nokia's now-settled litigation with Apple, which involved several standards-related patents that were required to be licensed under so-called FRAND guidelines; filing lawsuits over FRAND patents has become a hot-button topic under serious international scrutiny. At the same time, Nokia has a slightly harder road to proving that HTC, RIM, and Viewsonic are infringing these patents, and it's possible they can easily be designed around — HTC has been able to design around several of Apple's patents as that case progresses.

I suspect its just a matter of time before RIM starts down the same route.  The recent BB10 announcement is considered by pretty much everybody to be a Hail Mary, and those usually don't work out.

The problem for both Nokia/Microsoft and RIM is simply mind-share.  Pretty much everybody I know (and, I guess, everybody in general), is currently wrestling with the following choices

• iPhone only
• Android only
• iPhone and Android

See whats missing?
Yeah, the Windows and BB10 buckets seem to not just have holes in them, they're pretty much missing entirely.

Oh, don't get me wrong, the bigs (Foursquare, Twitter, etc) will surely develop for all of the platforms, but its the rank-and-file, the gratuitous app-developer with Instagram dreams, the hoi-polloi that really matter, and they don't are about Windows and BB10.  Again, the point isn't that Windows and BB10 aren't good platforms, its that the lumpen proletariat don't give a shit.  There is just too much other stuff in most people lives, and when presented with too many choices, well, people just go into denial and ignore the new stuff.

So yeah, the RIM shoe is probably going to drop any day now.

Update:  Its not just me, others are pointing this out too.