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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

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 feelings that Apple goes to defend their innovation.

drats 14y ago
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.
- chipotle_coyote 14y ago
  "Obvious" and "first" aren't identical, but they're not as separable as you're making them out to be. It's a stretch to say that a sliding door latch counts as prior art against a "slide to unlock" patent; that's essentially asserting that if there's any previous analogy to a claimed invention, the claim should be denied. Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation. That's kind of the point of patents. Apple got market share by doing stuff that nobody else in the phone market was doing. There were a lot of similar (but not identical) things that other companies did in bits and pieces, but there simply wasn't anything else like the iPhone before the iPhone. (I'd argue that the most revolutionary thing the iPhone brought to the market had nothing to do with the patents, ironically; it had a web browser that just blew the doors off anything available in a device that size in 2007. The biggest sign that Apple got that right is how dominant WebKit-based browsers are on mobile devices now.) A lot of the hatred directed against Apple over their "patent wars" seems to me to be misplaced: Apple is not abusing the patent system. They're not an Intellectual Ventures style patent troll. They're actually using the patents that they're fighting over. And it's very hard to make a successful argument that Samsung wasn't intentionally copying a lot of things about the iPhone, if only because they thought Apple got things right that previous Samsung models didn't. (In fact, it's hard to argue that it didn't work: the more Samsung made their phones like iPhones the more successful they got.) There are very good arguments to be made against software patents, maybe even against trade dress patents, and maybe even against patents, period, as John Siracusa has suggested. Maybe patents just don't do what they were intended to do anymore. But it's not realistic to expect any technology company to take a bold stand against the patent system by refusing to sue over perceived patent violations. And it's not even very honest to keep portraying Apple as uniquely litigious in this area; Nokia and Motorola both initiated suits against Apple, and while Microsoft hasn't been going around suing everyone, they've just been collecting license fees on Android from manufacturers. By some estimates they've made more money on Android than Google has. If there's a problem here--and I think there is--it's with the patent system. The Apple-Samsung battle is a symptom of the problem. Let's not mistake it for the disease.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  The latch is only obvious in retrospect; it involves the emulation of physical constraints that most non-engineers couldn't even describe succesfully (springy handle, locking at the end) and great resilience to unintended input. If another manufacturer had made the iPhone, you would probably unlock it by pressing a sequence of keys. That's the most obvious design.
  - rustynails 14y ago
    I respectfully disagree. My thought process was 1. Passcode (alpha or numeric) 2. If I don't want a passcode, I need something else, and a single button won't do. Ok, drag something. The conclusion is obvious. You could argue that I am biased, and it would be impossible for me to counter. However, IMHO, sliding something was the obvious answer.
    - taligent 14y ago
      Except that a single button WILL do. Because you still need to press it in order to wake the screen up on pretty much every phone on the market today. Which begs the question why you wouldn't either go straight to the home screen or show a single continue button. Slide to unlock is not what most people would do in that situation.
    - ricardobeat 14y ago
      "drag something" was not a common interaction at the time, especially because there weren't any other products with touchscreens accurate enough for it (try to unlock a chinese %pad knockoff. they are 10x better than what existed in 2007). Remember, actually touching the screen was novelty.
  - Blara 14y ago
    I agree the latch is not a good comparison, but I did have "slide" to unlock on my walkman back in the day. (lock/unlock buttons)
- rayiner 14y ago
  So one thing to understand about patent law. A combination of existing features can be novel if the combination together is novel. However, in that case, the protection is extended to the combination only, not the individual features. Samsung isn't getting sued because Apple owns "pinch to zoom." That's not how you'd read the patent. What Apple owns is "pinch to zoom" in the context of a device containing a combination of all the other features. Samsung copied that device with that combination of features. With a device, I might add, that was changed from the default Android UI to look more like an iPhone.
  - learc83 14y ago
    >What Apple owns is "pinch to zoom" in the context of a device containing a combination of all the other features. That's completely incorrect--read the patent. Apple owns pinch to zoom on a touchscreen, so long as that pinch to zoom allows you to pinch multiple times to continue to zoom. Again apple owns an individual utility patent on what we consider pinch to zoom on touchscreens. If you use just that one feature you are infringing on their patent, and every android phone is infringing on that patent.
mattmcknight 14y ago
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.
alok-g 14y ago
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.)
bornhuetter 14y ago
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 store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone. No-one really thought to patent the obvious design decisions that would come with the viability of a large capacitive touchscreen - rectangular, large screen, few physical buttons, multitouch gestures such as pinch to zoom (that already existed elsewhere). Apple are absolute masters at combining existing technology into an attractive package. They also have excellent timing at bringing products to market (just before the market is ready for them - see original iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air). But to say that these "innovations" wouldn't have happened anyway is disingenuous - no competent observer seriously believes that the market would not have moved on to large capacitive touchscreen devices over the last 5 years. Apple deserve plenty of credit for their OS animations, smoothness of UI and (either praise or damnation depending on your point of view) the curated app store. They don't deserve credit for "inventing the capacitive touchscreen phone".
- Nicole060 14y ago
  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.
mbell 14y ago
At the time the iphone was released I had one of the early HTC touch screen + slide out keyboard phones (Tytn or something like that). I recall laughing about the first iphones. Terrible e-mail support, no MMS, my year old phone had twice the capabilities. I couldn't understand why anyone would want such an expensive phone that was so functionally handicapped. What I didn't understand at the time was that the phone was never targeted at me, it was targeted at the general consumers who didn't care that it couldn't handle 5 e-mail accounts, VPN, etc, etc. The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building. Apple lept ahead of the incumbents by realizing that a 'smartphone' could be a device every consumer wanted, rather than something that 'business folks' used. It wasn't so much that the incumbents couldn't have thought up something very similar, it was that they were caught up dealing with their current target markets: business people whom needed a blackberry or Wmobile phone with exchange support, whom didn't want change, they wanted a device that did its job and didn't require them to think about it. Its very difficult for a company to have the foresight to produce a product that they know their current customers will hate. This is classic incumbents vs newcomers leap frogging, if you haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma" its worth checking out as it speaks directly to this pattern of development.
- slantyyz 14y ago
  >> The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building I disagree. I think the iPhone was the first smartphone that worked. The killer app on the phone was that it was the first phone to have a modern mobile browser. It was not a browser that "didn't suck", it was a damned good browser. I had an Eee at the time, and I would pick the tiny-by-comparison screen of the iPhone's browser over the Eee any day. Why? Because the smart tap-to-zoom really used the screen real estate effectively. On the Eee, I'd have to use both horizontal and vertical scrolling to read some content. No mobile browser before the iPhone's version of Safari even came remotely close.
  - mbell 14y ago
    The problem is that it didn't work as a 'smartphone' at all. It couldn't connect to blackberry's e-mail server, it couldn't connect to exchange, it couldn't send an MMS, it couldn't multitask or run background apps, it couldn't copy-paste. The iPhone was completely incapable of replacing existing smartphones for quite some time. It took blackberry's monopoly on 'push' e-mail dying and several updates to iOS before it could actually compete in the existing smartphone market. What original iPhone is, was the first 'smartphone' like device that every consumer wanted.
drumdance 14y ago
Only Apple had the supply chain to deliver a product at a reasonable cost.
- Nicole060 14y ago
  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.
  - drumdance 14y ago
    How many small devices -- not television sets -- had Samsung delivered before 2010 when the Galaxy S was launched? How many iPods had Apple delivered before the iPhone? To cite a simple example: the iPod disk drive system was based on exclusive access to Toshiba's then-new hardware. Apple did many, many deals of that nature, including outright acquisitions, to gain a technology advantage. Samsung has done a lot to keep up, but only after watching Apple do it first.
- taligent 14y ago
  Sorry but I actually laughed when you said this. You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. Apple was in NO way comparable to the likes of Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Motorola etc who had decades of pre-existing relationships in the mobile and component industries. Not to mention those companies were competing for lowest cost in some areas so had plenty of optimisation work already built into their supply chains.
  - drumdance 14y ago
    Is the iPhone an extension of the iPod, or conventional mobile technology? Apple did a hella lot to create the iPod supply chain and, because they sold direct to consumers instead of through carriers, knew a lot more about how to deliver the ideal experience.

drats 14y ago

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.

chipotle_coyote 14y ago
"Obvious" and "first" aren't identical, but they're not as separable as you're making them out to be. It's a stretch to say that a sliding door latch counts as prior art against a "slide to unlock" patent; that's essentially asserting that if there's any previous analogy to a claimed invention, the claim should be denied. Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation. That's kind of the point of patents. Apple got market share by doing stuff that nobody else in the phone market was doing. There were a lot of similar (but not identical) things that other companies did in bits and pieces, but there simply wasn't anything else like the iPhone before the iPhone. (I'd argue that the most revolutionary thing the iPhone brought to the market had nothing to do with the patents, ironically; it had a web browser that just blew the doors off anything available in a device that size in 2007. The biggest sign that Apple got that right is how dominant WebKit-based browsers are on mobile devices now.) A lot of the hatred directed against Apple over their "patent wars" seems to me to be misplaced: Apple is not abusing the patent system. They're not an Intellectual Ventures style patent troll. They're actually using the patents that they're fighting over. And it's very hard to make a successful argument that Samsung wasn't intentionally copying a lot of things about the iPhone, if only because they thought Apple got things right that previous Samsung models didn't. (In fact, it's hard to argue that it didn't work: the more Samsung made their phones like iPhones the more successful they got.) There are very good arguments to be made against software patents, maybe even against trade dress patents, and maybe even against patents, period, as John Siracusa has suggested. Maybe patents just don't do what they were intended to do anymore. But it's not realistic to expect any technology company to take a bold stand against the patent system by refusing to sue over perceived patent violations. And it's not even very honest to keep portraying Apple as uniquely litigious in this area; Nokia and Motorola both initiated suits against Apple, and while Microsoft hasn't been going around suing everyone, they've just been collecting license fees on Android from manufacturers. By some estimates they've made more money on Android than Google has. If there's a problem here--and I think there is--it's with the patent system. The Apple-Samsung battle is a symptom of the problem. Let's not mistake it for the disease.
ricardobeat 14y ago
The latch is only obvious in retrospect; it involves the emulation of physical constraints that most non-engineers couldn't even describe succesfully (springy handle, locking at the end) and great resilience to unintended input. If another manufacturer had made the iPhone, you would probably unlock it by pressing a sequence of keys. That's the most obvious design.
- rustynails 14y ago
  I respectfully disagree. My thought process was 1. Passcode (alpha or numeric) 2. If I don't want a passcode, I need something else, and a single button won't do. Ok, drag something. The conclusion is obvious. You could argue that I am biased, and it would be impossible for me to counter. However, IMHO, sliding something was the obvious answer.
  - taligent 14y ago
    Except that a single button WILL do. Because you still need to press it in order to wake the screen up on pretty much every phone on the market today. Which begs the question why you wouldn't either go straight to the home screen or show a single continue button. Slide to unlock is not what most people would do in that situation.
  - ricardobeat 14y ago
    "drag something" was not a common interaction at the time, especially because there weren't any other products with touchscreens accurate enough for it (try to unlock a chinese %pad knockoff. they are 10x better than what existed in 2007). Remember, actually touching the screen was novelty.
- Blara 14y ago
  I agree the latch is not a good comparison, but I did have "slide" to unlock on my walkman back in the day. (lock/unlock buttons)
rayiner 14y ago
So one thing to understand about patent law. A combination of existing features can be novel if the combination together is novel. However, in that case, the protection is extended to the combination only, not the individual features. Samsung isn't getting sued because Apple owns "pinch to zoom." That's not how you'd read the patent. What Apple owns is "pinch to zoom" in the context of a device containing a combination of all the other features. Samsung copied that device with that combination of features. With a device, I might add, that was changed from the default Android UI to look more like an iPhone.
- learc83 14y ago
  >What Apple owns is "pinch to zoom" in the context of a device containing a combination of all the other features. That's completely incorrect--read the patent. Apple owns pinch to zoom on a touchscreen, so long as that pinch to zoom allows you to pinch multiple times to continue to zoom. Again apple owns an individual utility patent on what we consider pinch to zoom on touchscreens. If you use just that one feature you are infringing on their patent, and every android phone is infringing on that patent.

mattmcknight 14y ago

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.

alok-g 14y ago

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.)

bornhuetter 14y ago

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 store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone. No-one really thought to patent the obvious design decisions that would come with the viability of a large capacitive touchscreen - rectangular, large screen, few physical buttons, multitouch gestures such as pinch to zoom (that already existed elsewhere). Apple are absolute masters at combining existing technology into an attractive package. They also have excellent timing at bringing products to market (just before the market is ready for them - see original iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air). But to say that these "innovations" wouldn't have happened anyway is disingenuous - no competent observer seriously believes that the market would not have moved on to large capacitive touchscreen devices over the last 5 years. Apple deserve plenty of credit for their OS animations, smoothness of UI and (either praise or damnation depending on your point of view) the curated app store. They don't deserve credit for "inventing the capacitive touchscreen phone".

Nicole060 14y ago
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.

mbell 14y ago

At the time the iphone was released I had one of the early HTC touch screen + slide out keyboard phones (Tytn or something like that). I recall laughing about the first iphones. Terrible e-mail support, no MMS, my year old phone had twice the capabilities. I couldn't understand why anyone would want such an expensive phone that was so functionally handicapped. What I didn't understand at the time was that the phone was never targeted at me, it was targeted at the general consumers who didn't care that it couldn't handle 5 e-mail accounts, VPN, etc, etc. The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building. Apple lept ahead of the incumbents by realizing that a 'smartphone' could be a device every consumer wanted, rather than something that 'business folks' used. It wasn't so much that the incumbents couldn't have thought up something very similar, it was that they were caught up dealing with their current target markets: business people whom needed a blackberry or Wmobile phone with exchange support, whom didn't want change, they wanted a device that did its job and didn't require them to think about it. Its very difficult for a company to have the foresight to produce a product that they know their current customers will hate. This is classic incumbents vs newcomers leap frogging, if you haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma" its worth checking out as it speaks directly to this pattern of development.

slantyyz 14y ago
>> The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building I disagree. I think the iPhone was the first smartphone that worked. The killer app on the phone was that it was the first phone to have a modern mobile browser. It was not a browser that "didn't suck", it was a damned good browser. I had an Eee at the time, and I would pick the tiny-by-comparison screen of the iPhone's browser over the Eee any day. Why? Because the smart tap-to-zoom really used the screen real estate effectively. On the Eee, I'd have to use both horizontal and vertical scrolling to read some content. No mobile browser before the iPhone's version of Safari even came remotely close.
- mbell 14y ago
  The problem is that it didn't work as a 'smartphone' at all. It couldn't connect to blackberry's e-mail server, it couldn't connect to exchange, it couldn't send an MMS, it couldn't multitask or run background apps, it couldn't copy-paste. The iPhone was completely incapable of replacing existing smartphones for quite some time. It took blackberry's monopoly on 'push' e-mail dying and several updates to iOS before it could actually compete in the existing smartphone market. What original iPhone is, was the first 'smartphone' like device that every consumer wanted.

drumdance 14y ago

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

Nicole060 14y ago
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.
- drumdance 14y ago
  How many small devices -- not television sets -- had Samsung delivered before 2010 when the Galaxy S was launched? How many iPods had Apple delivered before the iPhone? To cite a simple example: the iPod disk drive system was based on exclusive access to Toshiba's then-new hardware. Apple did many, many deals of that nature, including outright acquisitions, to gain a technology advantage. Samsung has done a lot to keep up, but only after watching Apple do it first.
taligent 14y ago
Sorry but I actually laughed when you said this. You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. Apple was in NO way comparable to the likes of Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Motorola etc who had decades of pre-existing relationships in the mobile and component industries. Not to mention those companies were competing for lowest cost in some areas so had plenty of optimisation work already built into their supply chains.
- drumdance 14y ago
  Is the iPhone an extension of the iPod, or conventional mobile technology? Apple did a hella lot to create the iPod supply chain and, because they sold direct to consumers instead of through carriers, knew a lot more about how to deliver the ideal experience.