Those looking forward to getting their hands on HTC’s new flagship device may be disappointed as the company’s new smartphone, the HTC One X, as well as the EVO 4G LTE (News - Alert) are being held up at the border by customs officials. The reason for the delay goes way back to March of 2010 when Apple (News - Alert) sued the Taiwanese phone manufacturer for infringing on 20 of its patents.

HTC’s inbound phones have to be reviewed in accordance with a December 2011 International Trade Commission ruling, which found HTC guilty of violating an Apple patent having to do with a UI feature that lets users tap on an address of a phone number as a link. According to HTC, its devices no longer infringe on this patent as the company claims it made efforts to work around the issue with the latest version of its Sense user interface.

“We are cooperating with the U.S. Customs to speed up the review process," said a spokesperson for the company.

The HTC One X, claimed by some to be the best Android phone yet, went on sale in the U.S. last month with AT&T (News - Alert) while the EVO 4G LTE is set to be released on Sprint’s network on May 18. Depending on how long the review takes, customers may experience shortages of the One X handset and the EVO 4G LTE may even miss its launch date.

This is just the latest development in the long lawsuit war between Apple and a number of Android (News - Alert) handset manufacturers. In a similar case, Apple sued Motorola over the use of slide to unlock on its Android phones.

Meanwhile, Apple has been going after Samsung (News - Alert) internationally for the last year or so with the two companies recently agreeing to work toward a resolution after neither of the phone manufacturers could gain any real ground in the courtroom.