Patents don't have to relate to hardware or even any product. With software patents, you can get a patent for an idea, and now anyone else who comes up with that idea has to pay you money, despite never having seen or heard of your patent. Software patents are purely an extortion racket, they do not create new ideas or encourage innovation, they only place artificial restrictions. Nokia probably has some garbage patent like "put text on a screen," but dressed up in fancy language, so now they're suing whoever looks like they might have money.

Honestly, anyone who holds a software patent should be shunned from the industry.