[AT&T, Rogers HTC One X, Telstra One XL] EarlyMon:
Certainly.

Here's a post from another forum when we had our first fix, it covers the patent itself -

Here is a post from elsewhere on XDA. Your takeaway - the top picture is how HTC Mail should work and does work in the rest of the world - the bottom picture is how Mail works in the USA when presented with web link in plain text. Notice that the normal action is to detect the url and make a link.

That's been removed. Along with other free-form app associations.

So we're clear - the behavior I'm describing is still the default on Gmail on your phone and in many places on your Windows PC.

It was prior art. Apple did not invent it. Yet, thanks to our messed up patent system, they got a patent on this.

Apple went after HTC on this a few years ago - no one else, just HTC.

In a decision that surprised even the judge's own clerks, in the 4th quarter of last year, Apple won a suit against HTC granting an injunction against distribution of the software. The market panicked, the internet was full of "proof" that HTC stole, consumers panicked thinking that they'd no longer get support and HTC's meteoric sales climb in 2011 came to an abrupt halt. Investors panicked. HTC earnings dropped.

The blogosphere, with all of the intelligence of brain-damaged monkeys, let loose with their HTC hate and said that the sales drop-off was a clear indication that everyone hated the people-centric Sense features (by then, adopted wholesale by Google for for ICS and the same bloggers praised it as a revolutionary breakthrough while picking lice from one another) and that's why HTC was a failure.

Newcomers to Android believed it and the myth was propagated until Mobile World Congress in Barcelona 2012 where the One X and Sense 4.0 was unveiled. Banana-eaters fell over themselves reporting on the new "light-weight" Sense (that is the same size at Sense 3.5) as a victory for monkeys with keyboards. HTC, not stupid, agreed with the blogosphere.

The One X train left the station, full steam ahead.

Enter Apple, they petitioned the courts again, not satisified that HTC was really following court orders. HTC clearly was, but that never stops a good shark-lawyer.

Next up - May of this year and HTC phones are held in quarantine by the US Customs Bureau while they checked again. Release dates were missed and re-scheduled for several HTC models (including the X), buyers got scared again - in no small part to the monkeys, now fully lobotomized, telling people that the USA might never see an HTC One X. Investors went from panic to bed-wetting of tidal proportions, and the head of HTC had to get help from the Prime Minister of Taiwan to curb the panic.

Oh, and then it turned out the phones were fine and got shipped. Full of hype, black eyes and lies but shipped and those of us who care about what we like, liked the One X and we bought them.

But - for that reason - basic Sense apps like Mail, Messaging, Calendar - do not perform the same stock in the USA as they did earlier this year and as they still do everywhere else in the world.

HTC first put in a simple on/off switch. Turn in one way, it's Sense. Turn it the other, it's hamstrung Sense. Easy to change. So easy that Apple complained again and with the Android 4.04 release, the latest Sense apps are _very_ different than before and you can't change it with an on/off switch.

There is a root mod to fix it in the Sprint community, called #Fapple, I'd guess it's out there for the One XL by now, but I'd have to check.

PS - The #Fapple pictures above were during debugging and aren't final the solution, but they show the point well enough.

TL/DR version - not HTC's fault that they have to make more than one version of things to work with JellyBean, and that adds time.