It seems that Motorola has harpooned the whale that is Apple with an injunction resulting in the latter's online store based in Germany ceasing the sales of its older versions of the iPhone and iPad (3G).

However, according to Apple's spokesperson, customers can still get their hands on the devices in Apple stores and legal resellers.

While the German website shows the older models of the devices as "not available" all the newer versions are up for grabs, including iPhone 4S or the solely wireless broadband based iPad.

The German court in Mannheim ruled that Apple has infringed the intellectual property of Motorola, also known as cell communications patents, which the latter has been voluntarily pitching to Apple in exchange for "reasonable licensing terms and conditions since 2007".

According to recent reports, Motorola had to fork out roughly 100m Euros to enforce the injunction on the technology giant.

Apple does not plan to leave the case at that - it intends to appeal the case, according to a company's spokesperson.

Lest we forget that this is not the only patent battle that Apple has on its head - it won some and lost some against Samsung as well as HTC, many other cases are still pending with its iCloud service being under threat as well as the push functionality.

A trivial piece of information: if push email gets taken away from the giant, Apple users will have to check their emails manually, as the BBC has reported.