Huawei Conspired to steal T Mobile's trade secrets from Tappy the Robot.

Corporate espionage? This is a great Tech story.

NPR: DOJ case claims Huawei hi-jinx with Tappy the T Mobile Robot.

The Justice Department unsealed two separate indictments of Chinese telecom device maker Huawei on Monday. But only one of them reads like the script of a slapstick caper movie.

That would be the one that describes the U.S. government's case alleging that Huawei stole trade secrets from T-Mobile, the wireless service company.

In the indictment, the government says that between June 2012 and September 2014, Huawei repeatedly made efforts to steal information about the design of a T-Mobile robot. The robot's name, adorably, is "Tappy."

We would like to include a photo here of Tappy, but photographing the robot is expressly prohibited by T-Mobile, and Tappy is kept under very tight security in a lab at T-Mobile headquarters in Bellevue, Wash.
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Meanwhile, Huawei China was reportedly trying to build its own device-testing robot — named, less cutely, "xDeviceRobot" — and it was not finding much success. And Huawei's devices weren't faring well on T-Mobile's Tappy tests, failing more often than devices made by competitors.

In May 2012, Huawei USA asked if Huawei China could license the Tappy technology, and T-Mobile said no.

That's when Huawei began attempting to steal the design secrets of Tappy, according to the indictment.

"xDeviceRobot" ??

One area where China falls woefully behind the rest of the world is in naming their Tech-AI-Robo devices. Honestly...the best they could think of is "xDeviceRobot"? That's not much of a creative leap since the days of Johnny Sokko.

"Flying Robot" and not Tappy