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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

#181

Ever notice how Jony Ive looks nothing like a Googler? This whole trainwreck of a discussion is fed IMHO by the big rift between common, male IT-oriented folks and the rest of the population around visuals, aestethics and yes, concepts like fashion. Sit in the cantina of any company and you can tell who is development/IT. Neckbeards? Socks in sandals? Leather cowboy hats? Attachments on their belts? Unshapely bodies?…

Spot-on (though prepare for the down-votes).

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

#182

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…

"The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn't until the app store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone."

Huh? Market wasn't ready? This is completely revisionist fantasy. In 2007, it was the best overall phone on the market, period, and the market was ready. People lined up around the block to drop $499 to $599 on a locked phone. They sold over 1 million phones in their first two and a half months. When they dropped the 8GB price to $399, they sold another 3 million phones through the Fall of 2007.

All evidence points to Apple bringing the capacitive touchscreen phone to market years before anyone else would have. That's what innovation is. Not invention, no, but only geeks and historians really care about invention. Innovation in the market is what enables people to actually be able to buy and use things.

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

#183
post #28
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"…

155 comments and only one mentioning Star Trek.

That too me says how we ended up in this situation.

Apple did good, they made a standard out of the portable mp3 players and slowly got to the stage were the only thing to add was the phone part, they then slowly got the feature sets inplace, all with elegant, simple and usage designs. Many obvious, if you study human interaction then swiping to turn a page to open another is clear cut as it's intuative. So yes some already exist and many cases of prior art, but it is all about the patent's (feel a Weird Al song a comming on) baby.

Another factor was the technology, Sony P800 springs to mind and been many other touch screens since with what was the PDA domain and eventual death of. What with camera's, filofax's, payphones the mobile phone is borging alot of markets, soon be sole internet as well eventualy, already is for some today.

But as is the rule in IT, everybody always hates the leader, be it IBM in there day, Microsoft in there time and now Apple. Each company going thru that hate phase grows a large lawyer department and carry's on until somebody else takes the limelight and the hate away from them. It's one of the cycle of life in many area's sadly, but true.

Bottom line and back to Star Trek and SCI-FI in general, you can bet Hollywood had patented there technology imaginations. Now if only we could get the anti-pirate lawyers turned into anti SCI-FI IP lawyers and chasing technology companies then we would truely have a circular centipede moment and some potentualy good TV veiwing as it is after all, a geek soap opera.

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

#184
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

i was referring more to the Samsung phones that run 2.2 or 2.3. The ones that run 4.0 and 4.1 cost the exact same as the iPhone, so people who buy phones like the SG3 (and 6 months ago, the SG2) are doing so because they CHOSE Android, not because it looks like an iPhone.

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

#185
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

Just because you can see the logical evolutionary history of a design in hindsight does not mean it's obvious. One of the considerations for "obviousness" is "failure of others." Companies failed for a decade to have usable touch-screen devices before Apple came out with the iPhone. Within just a couple of years, smartphones all went from looking like Treos to looking like iPhones. Multi-touch was a game-changer and…

You're reinterpreting what's written to fit your argument. Failure of others should be considered to define obviousness when you come up with something new that succeeds where others failed. Not because you can patent something someone else invented just because you sold better than the original inventor. That's absurd.

Apple's inventions existed before, so there's prior art, that's all. It's this simple.

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

#186

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…

> As far as I can tell, there's no evidence from those quotes that they skipped prior art, Except the actual quotes. > so much as skipped the task to move forward on others before circling back around to it. So they skipped it. Whether they came back to it is somewhat pointless. That they skipped an earlier question means that later questions were based on uninformed assumptions about patents. > Sigh. I'm sick and ti…

You're inventing a false narrative, whole cloth.

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

#187

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…

I wrote on my Palm Pilot Pro in '98 using my fingers. I preferred it to using the stylus, because it was faster and more comfortable for me. (Incidentally, when I left the job where I used the Palm at the end of '98, it was to work on developing a touch based tablet which had no stylus at all - see one of my other posts in this thread).

The stylus on the Palm was optional for better precision. It was by no means necessary. Not only could I write reliably with my fingertips on a Palm Pilot Pro, it was precise enough with my fingers to play games and draw stuff with it.

> This is the fundamental problem- you and others say nonsense like this

It's quite rich that you claim this when you yourself are making spurious claims about how these devices supposedly couldn't be used reliably with fingers. I can only conclude that you yourself do not have firs thand experience with these devices, or have forgotten how they worked.

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

#188

"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…

The laws are not a farce: "intellectual property" exists if society decides it exists, just like physical property is a legal fiction. "Property is theft", according to the left anarchists. Saying information is not property is no different. It's a political argument, not a factual one.

The whole reason we have property laws is scarcity. Such scarcity does exist in intellectual endeavours - the time and talent taken to invent and innovate. There's a lot to be said for evolving and modernizing IP laws, but you will find most people reject the claim that they shouldn't exist.

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

#189

"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.

I can't help but note that that's exactly what he said in his first sentence.

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

#190
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For people who believe that patents should be abolished: how do you see an ARM-like company existing without patent protection? Or do you think there is no value in being able to transact in designs?

The designs would surely be copyrightable.
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