Why shouldn't MSFT claim patents for FAT? They've developed it and it was adopted by everyone and their mother for being good and cheap FS.
You don't need to support FAT to allow transfer of files between your your Windows PC and the phone standards that abstract the file system like MTP and PTP exist for this very own reason.
If you are as a phone maker want to enable users to mount their local phone storage as a fully writable file system cheaply you just format the SDCard using FAT and pay royalties.
If you don't you can still easily bypass the FAT patent issue by creating your own abstraction layer which may or maynot require the user to use specialized software and drivers (BB manager/itune/kies etc.).
That said for the majority of users MTP and PTP are more than sufficient I have an iPhone now and I do not miss the mount-SD card feature one bit if I'm honest even without using iTunes on a non-jailbroken device.
I can still plugin the phone and transfer files from the camera which is pretty much the only bloodything I could do with it anyhow and for this Apple does not need to support FAR nor pay MSFT a dime.
You don't need to support FAT to allow transfer of files between your your Windows PC and the phone standards that abstract the file system like MTP and PTP exist for this very own reason.
If you are as a phone maker want to enable users to mount their local phone storage as a fully writable file system cheaply you just format the SDCard using FAT and pay royalties.
If you don't you can still easily bypass the FAT patent issue by creating your own abstraction layer which may or maynot require the user to use specialized software and drivers (BB manager/itune/kies etc.).
That said for the majority of users MTP and PTP are more than sufficient I have an iPhone now and I do not miss the mount-SD card feature one bit if I'm honest even without using iTunes on a non-jailbroken device.
I can still plugin the phone and transfer files from the camera which is pretty much the only bloodything I could do with it anyhow and for this Apple does not need to support FAR nor pay MSFT a dime.