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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

#31

Post by nirvana »

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…

> if it's not Linux or open source, it bad/wrong/etc.

It's ideological.

There is a trend in these objections in articles like this and across hacker news. They simply ignore what was unique about the iPhone and trivialize it completely and then pretend like it was obvious all along. Notice the repeated comparisons to stylus based devices as prior art for multi-touch. They don't care about the differences, as long as it takes some sort of touch imput, they can rationalize that Apple never invented anything.

I see this as an admission that they know the iPhone was revolutionary but they are making arguments from an ideological, rather than rational perspective.

If the iPhone wasn't revolutionary, how did Apple go from selling no phones to the selling the most popular phone in just a few years?

They say it was "marketing" and a "slick package" and the "Advantage" of charging "twice the price" --- as if charging more ever was the path to easy sales volume!

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

#32

Post by corin_ »

flatline3 wrote: post #27
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, t…

> All Apple does it pick up the legos and put them together?

That's how I think of them, and it's what I have great respect to them for. It can be worded to sound like a putdown, but in my opinion it should be considered a compliment.

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

#33

Post by sjwright »

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…

The LG Prada was a feature-phone with a nicer display. If Samsung had released the Prada in 2008, they would have been at zero risk from retaliation by Apple.

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

#34

Post by Nicole060 »

drats wrote: post #28
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"…

If it was so obvious then why did it take a company that had NO history in making cell phones to make a good one with a usable touchscreen and gestures ?

Nokia couldn't do it. RIM couldn't do it. Samsung couldn't do it. LG couldn't do it. (LG did make a touchscreen, and I owned one before I bought an iPhone, and it sucked hardcore)

And they were on that market way before Apple.

Cry me a river if it hurts your feelings that Apple goes to defend their innovation.

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

#35

Post by burke »

w1ntermute wrote: post #24
arn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://raw.github.com/gist/d07ed108f19bba1a4a10/34d4fdd407b...

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

#36

Post by dreamdu5t »

"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron and the laws are a farce. Information is not property. Property has no objective foundation if you decouple it from tangible or economic scarcity.

Samsung stole no property from Apple. Samsung was providing value to the market by responding to the market's demands that were exposed by Apple. The existence of patents distorts economic incentives to divert activity towards patentable inventions.

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

#37

Post by epo »

Ultimately this is a religious issue. The frothing anti-Apple hordes will never admit that Apple innovated and will always see Apple as in the wrong because, well, Apple is evil. These people then jump through logical hoops to justify their contortions. The simple truth is that Samsung copied from Apple wholesale. I for one hope the damages get tripled, not because Apple needs the money but because Samsung contributes precisely nothing of value to the market. They are like the idiot kid in class who tries to get ahead by copying the smart kid's work verbatim. Samsung are plagiarists and thieves.

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

#38

Post by mattmcknight »

kristianc wrote: post #7

It's interesting that all of the devices that are pictured are turned off. I remember using PDAs back in the day, and they tended to be fiddly affairs with styluses. Sure, you could use touch inputs, but touch input tended to be quite impractical, as the OS on the phone invariably tended to be a modified version of a desktop OS. [1] Ever since the mobile phone was invented, there has been experimentation with form fa…

I used touch on the Treo all of the time, pre-apple, and didn't do too much with a stylus. There was nothing about PalmOS that was desktop based, so your "invariably" statement is a lie.

You can't patent a screen size.

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

#39

Post by [deleted] »

arrrg wrote: post #29
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 hav…

[deleted]

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

#40

Post by mattmcknight »

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…

Yet oddly they didn't mention the innovativeness of the rounded corners and rectangular shape.
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