E-Contact Technologies [NPE] filed suit against Acer, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Sony Ericsson, and ZTE, alleging that the defendants’ smartphones infringe a patent related to managing date records.  The complaint alleges that the defendants are properly joined as they sell “a large number of overlapping smartphone products” that use the Android operating system.  E-Contact has filed eight prior suits since September 2011 against Apple, AT&T, Dell, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm, Rackspace, Samsung, Toshiba, and Verizon.  The patent-in-suit was assigned by the inventor to E-Contact Technologies in August 2011.  The named correspondent on the assignment is Daniel Mitry, one of the attorneys behind patent licensing entity, Empire IP.  7/13, Eastern District of Texas, no judge yet assigned, 1:2012cv00352.