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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

#151

Post by MatthewPhillips »

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…

> No one is trying to stop them from selling smartphones, all we're saying is: make your own. Make your own designs, make your own phones, and compete on your own innovations.

A world where every product is completely differentiated from its competitors is neither possible nor desirable.

You can't stop Samsung from making smartphones, they're significantly entrenched already, but you can stop a startup. This ruling is a validation of the patent system as it currently exists. Just as MPEG LA can prevent startups from competing in video, the range of smartphone patents are thick enough to prevent any newcomers into the industry.

If Apple owns bouncy lists and Google owns shadowy lists and RIM owns whatever it is they do, what is a startup to do? Come up with something that is different just to be different, hope that it's not patented by someone, as I'm sure trolls are rushing to patent every variation of end-of-list animations possible, or more probably, not bother getting into the business in the first place.

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

#152

Post by Nicole060 »

drumdance wrote: post #115
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…

Only Apple had the supply chain to deliver a product at a reasonable cost.

You can't be serious. Samsung has a far better supply chain than Apple. In fact, Samsung IS PART of Apple's supply chain.

But Samsung is not the kind of company that would take risks with a market and they'd rather ride on the coattails of those who are willing to push the innovation into the hands of the consumers, and it's not something specific to their mobile division, it's the same for their digital cameras, home appliances.. I've seen during the history of photography most of the big names doing something that may have impacted the market, while Samsung is just saying "hey, me-too!" months laters.

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

#153

Post by nivla »

nirvana wrote: post #86
corin_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.

>Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them.

Umm... I guess you never used a kiosk before the Iphone then. Calling someone lego assembler is not necessarily a bad thing. You can put two and two together and create great things but people are bound to copy great things and make it better. That is how innovation drives forward. Ever heard of the phrase "Reinventing the wheel"? Well, if everybody had patents on their "wheel", then everyone else has to waste their time and resources on reinventing the wheel. Like, Reddit was 4chan and Digg put together with better improvements. Putting two and two might make u a lego assembler but the end result isn't that bad!

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

#154

Post by radley »

lawdawg wrote: post #101
shasta wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely Apple deserves to be compensated for all the development work they did. Who's going to develop the next iPhone caliber innovation if the only reward they'll receive is to become the wealthiest company in history? Oh wait...

and people act like all Samsung did was copy. You realize they wouldn't be the most successful Android OEM if they didn't do their own innovation as well. And no, people aren't rushing out the buy Samsung phones because they look like iPhones (I mean they don't even have an Apple on the back, should be pretty obvious to anyone that it isn't an iPhone), they are buying them because they are cheaper and can do 90% of w…

More like they can do 120% of what iOS can do. It's the UI mistakes that hurt them now. TouchWiz and S-Apps demonstrate innovation, but some of it is extremely disorganized (phone app) or painfully copied from iOS (S Voice).

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

nirvana wrote: post #86
corin_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by dasil003 »

nirvana wrote: post #111
antidoh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them." Hmmm. I'm still using my Palm Centro phone, which used to be a Treo, which used to be a Palm PDA, which used to be a Palm Pilot. All of those have a touch oriented UI, and most if not all of them pre-date iPhone by years. So now I guess we can watch the debate about whether Newton or its competitors pre-date each other.

None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. Very different from a stylus which is only touching one or two pixels at a time. This is very easy to sense because the stylus pushes two layers together physically and effectively is closing swithces. A touch is much difeferent, a finger is an amorphous blob over many pixels of a varying shape, and Apple had to figure out how to resolve that into a sin…

Apple didn't invent touch UI. Ever been to a restaurant in the last decade?

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

#157

Post by hnriot »

corin_ wrote: post #128
nirvana wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. Very different from a stylus which is only touching one or two pixels at a time. This is very easy to sense because the stylus pushes two layers together physically and effectively is closing swithces. A touch is much difeferent, a finger is an amorphous blob over many pixels of a varying shape, and Apple had to figure out how to resolve that into a sin…

> Touch means finger touches. According to who, you? Feel free to argue around the technological improvements Apple have brought, but to argue that everything everybody has always called "touchscreen" isn't that... makes no sense. And even by your strange definition of a "touch based UI", were Apple the first company to create capacitive touch screens? Hell, I don't think they were even the first to create phones usi…

Of course touch means finger touches. Writing with a pencil or stylus isn't called touching. This is pretty basic stuff, it just seems as though you have some axe to grind with this poster and want to nit pik at semantics, but in doing to it just looks rather childish.

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

#158

Post by Nicole060 »

lotharbot wrote: post #102
Nicole060 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "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* Consider the following headlines: "Love your kids? Prove it by beating them."* http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=beat "Green Peace blows, pave the rain forests!" http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=green_peace "When is the last time a…

Because I'm not really criticizing Maddox himself, but the people who really took that page seriously and used it as part of all their anti-iPhone pseudo analysis during the great flamewars in 2007. You didn't really need to delve further into the site because I already knew about the kind of stuff it is.

Point is, most people in 2007 were criticizing the iPhone for not having a keyboard. That funny maddox link had an opportunity to be taken seriously. Make a google search for things posted in 2007 and you'll see by yourself what people who never handled an iPhone at the time thought of the idea of a phone 100% operated with a touchscreen. How many predicted the iPhone would fail way before anyone even had the opportunity to test one ? sounds like the iPhone and what it does wasn't that obvious.

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

#159

Post by bornhuetter »

gnaffle wrote: post #135
bornhuetter wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why didn't they all have capacitive iPhone look-alikes ready in the lab then? The Samsung evidence showed that they did. Not as good as the iPhone, certainly, but they were obviously all thinking about it. > Apple ... should be credited with making the first usable, mass market touchscreen smartphone. I completely agree with this. But they don't deserve a monopoly on it. > Isn't it more reasonable to assume that th…

What evidence was presented that Samsung had a similar phone in the works in 2007? One with a capacitive touchscreen and a user interface optimized for finger touch? For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it, but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future? I didn't say the market wouldn't move. Of course it…

> Why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future?

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus.

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually

So we basically agree.

When I first saw the iPhone I thought it was the way of the future. But I thought the current form was awful. When the G1 came out it was even worse than the iPhone. The market simply wasn't ready yet; but Apple got in there with something barely usable for a price that a few early movers could afford.

Over time, both Apple and Google refined their systems into amazing, world changing devices.

There were two obvious ways of building these phones - 1. with menus 2. with icons. That is the way all feature phones that I know of worked. Google added widgets to this, and eventually Microsoft came up with the completely new idea of tiles.

> I think it's odd to think that ... Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

I never said anything remotely like that. It was entirely intentional that they put together the iPhone and brought it to market at the exact point in time that it became viable. That's why they are the most valuable company in the world. They deserve the huge success they have had, but, again, they don't deserve a monopoly.

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

mark_integerdsv wrote: post #118
nirvana wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.

Just like to add that there are innovations in terms of manufacturing that affect the marketplace at large that are solely due to Apple requirements. I'm talking about Gorilla Glass (factory funded by Apple so the inventor of the substance could churn it out for iPhones) and now Retina displays. Did Samsung build their own Retina production plant? I also don't buy that essentially saying: "go find your own way to do…

[deleted]
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