Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

osnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 437 posts

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

#41

Post by H_L »

corin_ wrote: post #32
flatline3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe not a putdown, but it's silly to view Apple's defining characteristic as their ability to assemble a device from available parts.

If that ability is what makes them successful, then their rival phone manufacturers should be even more successful since they often use faster processors and bigger screens and more RAM than Apple.

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

#42

Post by mattmcknight »

Nicole060 wrote: post #25
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 onl…

Many of us still use a slider phone with a keyboard. Yet those have been found infringing of Apple's illegitimate patents.

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

#43

Post by sjwright »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #36

"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 patenta…

It sounds like your problem is with the law, not Apple.

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

#44

Post by corin_ »

H_L wrote: post #41
corin_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe not a putdown, but it's silly to view Apple's defining characteristic as their ability to assemble a device from available parts. If that ability is what makes them successful, then their rival phone manufacturers should be even more successful since they often use faster processors and bigger screens and more RAM than Apple.

It's not about the ability to put them together, it's about deciding what to put together, when to do it, how to market it and of course a big part: what software to put on it.

I'd never say "all Apple do is" about this, just that it is what they do, and they do it better than anyone else.

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

#45

Post by mattmcknight »

Nicole060 wrote: post #5

As someone who has owned a pre-iPhone phone with a touchscreen, and seen another one in the hand of a friend, no, what made the iPhone the iPhone is NOT obvious. For the love of god, my LG Prada was so shitty I had to hit a 2px scrollbar with my thumb to scroll in the contact list. I can't contain the nervous laugh whenever some ignorant who never touched the device link to wikipedia proud of their attempt at mocking…

You are basically saying the iPhone was of higher quality- things worked better. This is true, but you can't patent quality.

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

#46

Post by sigzero »

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 jury can only decide based on the facts before it. NO PRIOR ART was presented to them. They argued about how that seemed weird. Then they decided that the discussion, which could serve no purpose anyway because they still wouldn't be able to decide based on prior art they were never given, was taking too long. So they moved on.

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

#47

Post by [deleted] »

Nicole060 wrote: post #5

As someone who has owned a pre-iPhone phone with a touchscreen, and seen another one in the hand of a friend, no, what made the iPhone the iPhone is NOT obvious. For the love of god, my LG Prada was so shitty I had to hit a 2px scrollbar with my thumb to scroll in the contact list. I can't contain the nervous laugh whenever some ignorant who never touched the device link to wikipedia proud of their attempt at mocking…

[deleted]

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

#48

Post by timmyd »

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"…

What I am not questioning is it's considered valid under law according to this case in the United States and abstracting yourself from the view of hating or not hating patent law - that's the test here.

It is irrelevant what a group of people can come up with 1 sec past the filing date, even on the other side of the world - the test is, given the available knowledge at the time of filing the patent and relevant to a person who is skilled in the art of the current available knowledge - would they be able to replicate the features detailed in the invention specification (essentially off my head).

In this case - it was ruled no. Despite all the prior art presented to the jury, despite all the previous evidence and so on and so on - it was considered wilfull infringement and a lot of the evidence presented showed that Samsung basically said "this feature of Apples is cool! lets copy that" ... which is pretty striking to lay-persons not skilled in law as jurors and tends to heavily weigh in their mind. And again, patent law considers - in some detail - that blends can in fact be new inventions. Patent law in the United States is very different to the rest of the world however and that has to be considered in this - the tests in Europe are much stricter and that's why many software patents aren't available there.

For context - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro...

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

#49

Post by Nicole060 »

sjwright wrote: post #33
jonknee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The LG Prada was so bad you had to use 2px scrollbars with your thumb to scroll down a list, like a contact list. It was like using Windows XP on earlier touch devices. I don't think making something like the Prada in 2008 would have helped Samsung's case in any way, because it had none of the things that made the iPhone great, none of the features people copied from the iPhone.

The LG Prada was a complete failure, because your old, classic feature phones like those in clamshell form were MORE usable with their keyboards than the Prada and its really bad touchscreen and bad software. I wanted to go back to a regular phone real fast when I made the mistake of buying a Prada. Not quite the same experience that people have when they buy an iPhone.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN