In increasingly hostile patent wars, an emoticon claim is part of four new patent assertions made by Samsung against Apple in front of a German court, Foss Patents reports.

Just when you thought ongoing legal battles over smartphone patents couldn't get any more bizarre, along comes a new claim by Samsung that Apple is infringing on its intellectual property rights with the way the latter company processes smiley faces on its iPhones.

The claim concerns one of four new patents that Samsung asserted before a German court late last week, according to Florian Mueller's Foss Patents blog. Samsung is also suing Apple over three more patent claims that were asserted this past April, while Apple has six patent claims lodged against Samsung in Germany, including one concerning Apple's slide-to-unlock mechanism for its iPhones.

Samsung's new claims concern its patents for a "method and apparatus for reporting inter-frequency measurement using RACH message in a communication system;" a "method for configuring gain factors for uplink service in radio telecommunication system;" a "speech output device for data displayed on mobile telephone converts data from display into speech data for output via loudspeaker;" and an "emoticon input method for mobile terminal."

Some of those claims against Apple have been made by Samsung in other jurisdictions, including the U.S., Mueller notes.

"I wouldn't be surprised if Apple decided to respond to this escalation by bringing several additional patent infringement lawsuits against Samsung in Germany," he writes. "Since Apple already has six lawsuits going against Samsung in Mannheim, it might start a few new ones in Munich. Apple is also suing Motorola and HTC in both regional courts in parallel. And in a third one (Düsseldorf), Apple has its design-related litigation going with Samsung. Two hearings are scheduled in those litigations for next week."

In last week's session in the German court, Samsung appears to have withdrawn an earlier request for a ruling on Apple products like the iPhone 4S that use Qualcomm baseband chips, but "did not waive its rights with respect to baseband patent assertions against the iPhone 4S in general," Mueller reports.