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A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

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Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#21

Post by slantyyz »

arn wrote: post #4

Why are PDAs suddenly that weird uncle you never talk about and only see at birthdays? Because they ultimately failed in the market. There was a reason that the Blackberry and Treo type devices became popular. They worked better than the early touchscreen devices. Those early deficiencies left manufacturers gunshy about creating more touchscreen devices. It was combination of hardware issues (resistive, single touch)…

>> It was not obvious in 2007 that such a device (full touchscreen, no physical keyboard) would succeed.

Yes. All my Blackberry toting friends were pooh-poohing the notion of a virtual keyboard, and now, the loudest critics among my peers have totally jumped ship, singing a different tune.

Regarding PDAs being that "weird uncle"...

I've had just about every PDA form-factor going back to the clamshell Sharp Wizards (which had these weird touch panels) in the late 80s to the Newton Messagepad to Windows CE, Palm and eventually Windows Mobile. The iPhone is the first "PDA" that I actually consistently use. The way you used the core features of the phone (contacts and calendar) were vastly better than anything I used prior.

Of course, I would have no problem using any "post-iOS" phone OS, which would include Windows Phone, Android and Web OS, but there really is something about the first iPhone UI that made it special. Is it as special today? Not really, but in 2007, yeah, it was pretty revolutionary.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#23

Post by arn »

w1ntermute wrote: post #16

This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0] > "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the produc…

This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."

They later went back to it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044427040457761...

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#24

Post by w1ntermute »

arn wrote: post #23
w1ntermute wrote: post #16

This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0] > "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the produc…

This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down." They later went back to it. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044427040457761...

Full text? I'm getting the paywall.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#25

Post by Nicole060 »

batista wrote: post #6

> This is a very common trend in this entire debate that saddens me to no end: the iPhone is being compared to simple feature phones, while in fact, it should be compared to its true predecessor: the PDA. PDAs have always done with few buttons. So, 1) having "few" buttons + stylus 2) in a different product category 3) in devices that very few people bought or cared about, means, in Thom's reasoning, that the iPhone w…

Not only the reviews of the people who had tried the device were glowing, even of those who turned into Apple haters lately (either because of the trial or because of app store policies), but the opinion of those who had NOT tried the device is even more interesting, as 99% of those who had never tried a device that had an actually working touchscreen, with the right software inside, thought that the iPhone could only fail ! Everyone was predicting the failure of the iPhone because they couldn't imagine a device without a keyboard nor a stylus could work.

This is the kind of drivel that was shared around the internet at the time of the iPhone's release : http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone One of the first lines : "First of all, the E70 has a full keyboard, not some shitty stripped down, tap-and-pray smudgy piece of shit."

I wonder what the author and the people who spread that link all over the internet at the time think of most Android handsets, Windows Phone, since they hated so much the idea of a phone without a keyboard.

When you look at the criticism from those who had not tried the device you really have to stop and ask : was the iPhone obvious ? The answer itself is obvious, and it's no, it wasn't. They couldn't imagine a phone that could be usable without a keyboard until they tried it with their own hands. "Tap and pray" ? hahaha.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#26

Post by notatoad »

jonknee wrote: post #19
equalarrow wrote: post #2

"Just to drive the point home: a device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious.." I still don't buy it. This still misses the mark - it wasn't about a 'few' buttons, the iPhone was about none. All those pda's in the picture don't really mean anything to me. Sure, some of them had cell networking and a lot (most? all?) had wifi. But I would never consider the old pda's a mobile device. 'Mobile' to me comes fro…

The LG Prada pre-dates the iPhone and was actually the first phone to have a capacitive touch screen. It had as many buttons as the infringing Samsung devices ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada ). This was noticed at the time of the iPhone launch too: http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/11/iphone-and-lg-ke850-separ... This is all silly though, Apple wasn't making the argument based on Samsung making a touch based ph…

If you read the jury comments though, they made a single decision based on the overall look and feel of the device, and then applied that decision to all the arguments. Essentially, they felt like Samsung had broadly copied apple's look and feel, therefore apple deserved exclusive ownership of things like rubber band, whether they invented it or not.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#27

Post by flatline3 »

w1ntermute wrote: post #16

This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0] > "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the produc…

The groklaw quotes were taken out of context. As far as I can tell, there's no evidence from those quotes that they skipped prior art, so much as skipped the task to move forward on others before circling back around to it.

> I don't like to think of Apple as a pure innovator - I think of them more as an assembler. When they see a market in which all the hardware pieces are available and waiting to be put together, they do that in such a way that the final product appeals to the end-user, particularly through the design of appropriate software.

Really? All Apple does is pick up the legos and put them together?

Sigh. I'm sick and tired of people twisting reality to fit an Apple anti-hero narrative.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#28

Post by drats »

timmyd wrote: post #11

This has been spoken about over and over (refer to the heated discussion yesterday which wasn't my intention - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431382 ). The core of the article again - looks at the concept of obviousness. Refer here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn... - "One of the main requirements of patentability is that the invention being patented is not obvious, meaning that a…

This is silly, touch screen technology, faster ARM cpus and the rest make these things possible and came from elsewhere. My first computer with a GUI was 100mhz. As soon as smartphones got 600mhz+ and as soon as people get touch screens (foreshadowed endlessly in sci-fi) are you seriously suggesting that if you took a room of fresh graduates from a design school (which is a bar lower than "ordinary skill in the art" as most UI designers have years of experience) and brainstormed for an afternoon that you couldn't come up with all this? There is clear prior art on almost every aspect, it was just a new blend. And that which didn't have prior art was logical evolution (as I said in an earlier comment about phones unlocking + physical slide latch locks + touchscreen... slide to unlock, wow I don't think any designer could have thought of that /s).

I'm pretty sure there were mouse-gesture plugins for a couple of browsers before the iphone, forgetting the sci-fi prior art. So you are suggesting someone with a degree in UI design with knowledge of mouse gestures and presented with the problem of making a touch interface with a mobile would not find this obvious?

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#29

Post by arrrg »

w1ntermute wrote: post #16

This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0] > "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the produc…

I think the trial had a normal result given the legal framework. Sometimes trials like this might go a bit this or that way, but in general they will have results like this.

My own position on this is very simple: All (yes, all) patents should be abolished. The current law is the problem, not Apple or Samsung or the Jury or the judge.

I also think what Samsung did was – in part – morally reprehensible, but should have no legal consequences.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#30

Post by slantyyz »

Terretta wrote: post #14
batista wrote: post #6

> This is a very common trend in this entire debate that saddens me to no end: the iPhone is being compared to simple feature phones, while in fact, it should be compared to its true predecessor: the PDA. PDAs have always done with few buttons. So, 1) having "few" buttons + stylus 2) in a different product category 3) in devices that very few people bought or cared about, means, in Thom's reasoning, that the iPhone w…

This is the best response to the current "it wasn't really innovative" fad -- going back and quoting the reviews of the time, especially from detractors and skeptics. None were saying the iPhone was just more of the same inside a shiny marketing package.

I think the individual pieces of the first iPhone didn't seem innovative to many.

The camera was "meh" and didn't do video, the screen wasn't nearly as nice as the VGA screen on my e800, the OS didn't support 3rd party apps, where was 3G?, etc. etc.

The thing was that the gestalt of the iPhone was vastly superior to any of its predecessors.

They prioritized the right things -- anyone who had a Windows phone who had their phone crash during a call or forgot to quit the camera app and saw their battery die in a hour can attest to that.

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