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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

#71

Post by jsz0 »

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…

Apple did a really good job making Samsung's prior art claims look like straw grasping. Samsung screwed up the time-line on the Diamond Touch device which of course did not use a multi-touch display anyway. They claimed prior art on a bounce-back feature that worked in the exact opposite way as Apple's patent. Something like you open Safari and it starts bouncing because you are not scrolling. I don't think the jury was impressed and apparently this was the best Samsung had to offer.

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

#72

Post by bdcravens »

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…

Please repeat this quote whenever Google utilizes their 17,000 patents (plus 7000 pending) acquired from Motorola Mobility.

Oh wait ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9488453/Google-...

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

#73

Post by noonespecial »

The first time I saw an iPhone, I thought to myself "oh, finally an Jornada that actually works". The number of buttons, layout of those buttons and placement of audio and charge jacks on the iPhone and the HP Jornada are nearly identical. The home button is in the same place. The volume buttons are on the top left side. It was a perfect match. That apple had a stack of jornadas stashed in the back that they were "improving" seemed so damn obvious, I thought that was the point of the whole iPhone schtick.

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

#74

Post by Nicole060 »

bornhuetter wrote: post #63
Nicole060 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feeling…

The market was waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become viable. You can't use multitouch properly on resistive screens (or non-touchscreen devices). Apple pounced as soon as capacitive screens became viable - albeit extremely expensive at the time. The first iPhone was "ahead of its time" in the sense that the market wasn't really ready for it. The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn't until the app stor…

Funny, I never said they invented the capacitive touchscreen, but that's apple haters for you. What they did that no one else did before is to put the right gestures, the right UI, environment to make it work. I had a LG Prada, it had a capacitive touchscreen so I obviously know Apple didn't invent it.. except the LG Prada was also behaving the same as Windows XP on a tablet. You use widgets like scrollbars instead of gesture everywhere. That's no iPhone.

"The first iPhone was an expensive PoS" ? it was the first phone with a good web browser, that's already quite something in itself. I can't imagine browsing the web on a phone without double tap to fit a paragraph, pinch to zoom and a good engine like Webkit. That made it a feature phone, more than a smartphone, at the time, with the lack of things like installable software, but it was a damn good feature phone, and for those who use lot of webapps, it was probably better than most smartphones too.

For the record, I hate the app store. I hate not being able to install software outside of the curated app store. But I give credit where it's due, even if there are a lot of things I hate about Apple, they did make the one touch phone that was actually usable, as opposed to POS like LG Prada or Samsung Croix (pre-android touchscreens) interface.

It is really obvious looking at some of the ac adapters and dock connectors that Samsung intended to copy the whole appearance of the earlier iPhones to ride on Apple's coattails. Samsung tried to copy everything from the UI to the trade dress to patented technology. They behaved like shady Chinese companies making cheap knock offs.

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

#75

Post by ElliotMingee »

cstejerean wrote: post #15
theoj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the innovation here? Applying minimalism (an established style from the 60's) to computers and phones? Is that really worthy of patent protection? Asked another way, should I be granted a patent to apply minimalism to other objects all around me? Suitcases? Refrigerators? Etc? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism

Yes. There are plenty of things left that could use some simplicity and minimalism. Patent away.

Why does that warrant patent protection? The idea behind a patent is to protect innovation, however the innovative cost in that sense is negligible.

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

#76

Post by jsz0 »

mattmcknight wrote: post #45
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.

You can definitely patent the specific things that makes it better and perhaps even arrange a bunch of things that, by themselves, would not be patentable into the right order to make one bigger thing that is patentable.

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

#77

Post by nirvdrum »

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…

Interesting take on "mobile," which is a bit of a fuzzy term. So, I take it you don't consider the wifi-only iPad or the Nexus 7 to be mobile devices? I guess the concept of "mobile Web" has really made things murky.

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

#78

Post by nickbarnwell »

slantyyz wrote: post #68
sukuriant wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a dedicated hardware switch. I'd count it.

The funny thing about that switch is that in 2007, I thought it was the best invention in the world. It was a pain muting my Windows phones because you had to fiddle around with the UI to change the profile to silence the ringer.

That switch was on every single Treo device from the 270 onwards, and numerous feature phones had a hardware mute switch as well.

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

#79

Post by jsnell »

sigzero wrote: post #46
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.

I don't know where you're getting that idea from. There was definitely prior art presented during the trial at least on pinch to zoom, tap to zoom and the bounceback on scrolling.

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

#80

Post by gnaffle »

mattmcknight wrote: post #45
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.

That's why Apple patented a lot of the small details that make the iPhone better, instead of just patenting quality.
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