A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by manveru » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:29 PM UTC

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…

Turing machine in Lego (no mindstorm). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W08poVdPTGo

Not that I'm a fan of Apple, but putting things together nicely is pretty damn valuable and innovative.

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

#52

Post by drats » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:29 PM UTC

Nicole060 wrote: post #34

drats wrote: 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"…

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…

People don't own ideas, they are granted temporary monopoly on real innovations to encourage their disclosure so that they, in the short term, and society, in the long term, can profit. The question isn't "first" the question is "obvious". I would argue with gestures already established and real touch screens a group of designers would quickly come up with a latch (horizontal stroke), a door handle (curving stroke), a safe padlock/rotary phone (circular motion) and general patterns (nine dots, some pattern dragging across them) rather easily. Spreading the fingers or the hand to zoom was already in minority report (2002). Double taps to do something different is already in the double clicking of the mouse.

Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.

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

#53

Post by zoop » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:30 PM UTC

Palm devices used a stylus and had text input via a special language at the bottom of the screen. How is this remotely related to the Samsung/Apple patent issues at hand?

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

#54

Post by mattmcknight » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:30 PM UTC

Nicole060 wrote: post #34

drats wrote: 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"…

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…

But that's not what the patents were for that were at issue in this case. They did it better, that's why they won in the marketplace. Now that other competitors are catching up in quality, they are turning to the illegitimate patents they were awarded to abuse the world legal system to go after them.

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

#55

Post by alok-g » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:31 PM UTC

Nicole060 wrote: post #34

drats wrote: 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"…

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…

Obviousness here is being talked about with regards to "patents". It is highly possible to create a new good design without creating new inventions.

That Nokia, RIM and others could not do it does not necessarily imply that Apple had some really unique inventions that enabled it to do so. (That Apple claims to be so is a different thing. That Samsung willfully copied their design elements is also a different thing.)

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

#56

Post by slantyyz » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:32 PM UTC

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"…

You wouldn't even need to put a bunch of geniuses in a room together for an afternoon. All you would have to do is get a team to watch any episode of Star Trek:TNG and create something like the slates the Enterprise crew used.

But the thing is, if the hardware components and UI skills existed, why wasn't anyone able to do it in the past?

I think the answer is that on the manufacturer side, nobody cared about end-users, and the nature of the business was that the carriers dictated a lot about what went into a phone.

So with the iPhone, here comes Apple, managing to get a carrier to play Apple's game, and saying "take our phone and its UX or leave it".

So sure, you might have been able to get a bunch of geniuses to come up with such a phone, but you probably would have had no ability to get it on the market successfully, because you wouldn't have been able to get any carrier buy-in without the clout of a company that has sold millions upon millions of portable media devices like Apple.

Until Apple came around, phone manufacturers treated the carriers as the customers, not the end-users. So if you take it that context, I doubt that something like the iPhone was at all obvious to the HTCs, Samsungs and RIMs of the world.

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

#57

Post by sjwright » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:33 PM UTC

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…

The grid based icon system isn't an innvoation, nor is it even a significant part of the iPhone product -- but it's a key part of the trade dress, which explains why Samsung were so keen to appropriate it. It allowed them to market their phone as seemingly substantially similar to the iPhone. It allowed Samsung to imply "this product is basically the same as that iPhone that everyone's raving about". Customers didn't need to think they were buying an Apple product to be misled.

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

#58

Post by Nicole060 » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:34 PM UTC

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.

Are you saying there is nothing to patent about the implementation of gestures on your touchscreen, as opposed to hitting widgets like scrollbars ? You couldn't be more wrong.

And people who cite things like the people who did multitouch with an array of cameras obviously don't understand patents. Patents are not about an idea but an implementation. The earlier multitouch stuff had nothing to do with the multitouch on a capacitive screen.

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

#59

Post by batista » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:34 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #30

Terretta wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the best response to the current "it wasn't really innovative" fad -- going back and quoting the reviews of the time, especially from detractors and skeptics. None were saying the iPhone was just more of the same inside a shiny marketing package.

I think the individual pieces of the first iPhone didn't seem innovative to many. The camera was "meh" and didn't do video, the screen wasn't nearly as nice as the VGA screen on my e800, the OS didn't support 3rd party apps, where was 3G?, etc. etc. The thing was that the gestalt of the iPhone was vastly superior to any of its predecessors. They prioritized the right things -- anyone who had a Windows phone who had t…

>The camera was "meh" and didn't do video, the screen wasn't nearly as nice as the VGA screen on my e800, the OS didn't support 3rd party apps, where was 3G?, etc. etc.

With that you reminded me of the now classic response of Slashdot's Commander Taco when the first iPod was introduced:

"No Wireless. Less Space Than A Nomad. Lame".

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

#60

Post by silentscope » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:35 PM UTC

I don't want to stir up bad blood, I'm just making a point so don't kill me =).

Almost every one of those devices has at least 5 buttons (up, down, left, right center). That's not simple at all. One button is simple. The touch screen on the iphone takes those away so only one is needed. It's the reason the iphone got so dominant--it worked.

It's the reason Jobs realized his foray into tableting in the 90s (with development starting in 1987, the first being released in 1993!), the Newton, sucked. He killed it when he realized it wasn't working. The tech wasn't there, when it was, he moved.

I know people hate apple, but they need to look at this objectively. this wasn't apples first rodeo--they helped write the book on the PDA market. They're also not suing palm or Visor or HP. Those companies didn't reiterate. Apple did.

If you wanna hate, hate being judged by a jury of your peers (you probably shouldn't do that), or our current patent system. And drink some tea or something.