<story><title>A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious</title><url>http://www.osnews.com/story/26309/A_device_with_a_touchscreen_and_few_buttons_i_was_i_obvious</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Nicole060</author><text>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 ?&lt;p&gt;Nokia couldn&apos;t do it. RIM couldn&apos;t do it. Samsung couldn&apos;t do it. LG couldn&apos;t do it. (LG did make a touchscreen, and I owned one before I bought an iPhone, and it sucked hardcore)&lt;p&gt;And they were on that market way before Apple.&lt;p&gt;Cry me a river if it hurts your feelings that Apple goes to defend their innovation.</text></item><item><author>drats</author><text>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 &quot;ordinary skill in the art&quot; as most UI designers have years of experience) and brainstormed for an afternoon that you couldn&apos;t come up with all this? There is clear prior art on almost every aspect, it was just a new blend. And that which didn&apos;t have prior art was logical evolution (as I said in an earlier comment about phones unlocking + physical slide latch locks + touchscreen... slide to unlock, wow I don&apos;t think any designer could have thought of that /s).&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m pretty sure there were mouse-gesture plugins for a couple of browsers before the iphone, forgetting the sci-fi prior art. So you are suggesting someone with a degree in UI design with knowledge of mouse gestures and presented with the problem of making a touch interface with a mobile would not find this obvious?</text></item><item><author>timmyd</author><text>This has been spoken about over and over (refer to the heated discussion yesterday which wasn&apos;t my intention - &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431382&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431382&lt;/a&gt;). The core of the article again - looks at the concept of obviousness.&lt;p&gt;Refer here - &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn...&lt;/a&gt; - &quot;One of the main requirements of patentability is that the invention being patented is not obvious, meaning that a &quot;person having ordinary skill in the art&quot; would not know how to solve the problem at which the invention is directed by using exactly the same mechanism.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Predominately - &lt;i&gt;&quot;that obviousness should be determined by looking at
the scope and content of the prior art;
the level of ordinary skill in the art;
the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art; and
objective evidence of nonobviousness.
In addition, the court outlined examples of factors that show &quot;objective evidence of nonobviousness&quot;. They are:
commercial success;
long-felt but unsolved needs; and
failure of others.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;See also - &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_35_of_the_United_States_Code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_35_of_the_United_States_C...&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Again - this article is attempting to state &quot;oh because PDA existed, that means that everything related to &lt;i&gt;a device with a touchscreen and few buttons&lt;/i&gt; was obvious&quot;. but again, thats untrue.&lt;p&gt;I still believe - in additional the complex legal arguments - the comment below was one of greatest aspects that changed the lay-persons juror mind. Per the Apple lawyer Harold McElhinny&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&quot;In those three months, Samsung was able to copy Apple&apos;s 4-year investment in the iPhone, without taking any of the risks—because they were copying the world&apos;s most successful product ... No one is trying to stop them from selling smartphones, all we&apos;re saying is: make your own. Make your own designs, make your own phones, and compete on your own innovations.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bornhuetter</author><text>The market was waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become viable.  You can&apos;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 &quot;ahead of its time&quot; in the sense that the market wasn&apos;t really ready for it. The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn&apos;t until the app store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone.&lt;p&gt;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).&lt;p&gt;Apple are absolute masters at combining existing technology into an attractive package.  They also have excellent timing at bringing products to market (&lt;i&gt;just&lt;/i&gt; before the market is ready for them - see original iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air).&lt;p&gt;But to say that these &quot;innovations&quot; wouldn&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;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&apos;t deserve credit for &quot;inventing the capacitive touchscreen phone&quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious</title><url>http://www.osnews.com/story/26309/A_device_with_a_touchscreen_and_few_buttons_i_was_i_obvious</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Nicole060</author><text>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 ?&lt;p&gt;Nokia couldn&apos;t do it. RIM couldn&apos;t do it. Samsung couldn&apos;t do it. LG couldn&apos;t do it. (LG did make a touchscreen, and I owned one before I bought an iPhone, and it sucked hardcore)&lt;p&gt;And they were on that market way before Apple.&lt;p&gt;Cry me a river if it hurts your feelings that Apple goes to defend their innovation.</text></item><item><author>drats</author><text>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 &quot;ordinary skill in the art&quot; as most UI designers have years of experience) and brainstormed for an afternoon that you couldn&apos;t come up with all this? There is clear prior art on almost every aspect, it was just a new blend. And that which didn&apos;t have prior art was logical evolution (as I said in an earlier comment about phones unlocking + physical slide latch locks + touchscreen... slide to unlock, wow I don&apos;t think any designer could have thought of that /s).&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m pretty sure there were mouse-gesture plugins for a couple of browsers before the iphone, forgetting the sci-fi prior art. So you are suggesting someone with a degree in UI design with knowledge of mouse gestures and presented with the problem of making a touch interface with a mobile would not find this obvious?</text></item><item><author>timmyd</author><text>This has been spoken about over and over (refer to the heated discussion yesterday which wasn&apos;t my intention - &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431382&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431382&lt;/a&gt;). The core of the article again - looks at the concept of obviousness.&lt;p&gt;Refer here - &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn...&lt;/a&gt; - &quot;One of the main requirements of patentability is that the invention being patented is not obvious, meaning that a &quot;person having ordinary skill in the art&quot; would not know how to solve the problem at which the invention is directed by using exactly the same mechanism.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Predominately - &lt;i&gt;&quot;that obviousness should be determined by looking at
the scope and content of the prior art;
the level of ordinary skill in the art;
the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art; and
objective evidence of nonobviousness.
In addition, the court outlined examples of factors that show &quot;objective evidence of nonobviousness&quot;. They are:
commercial success;
long-felt but unsolved needs; and
failure of others.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;See also - &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_35_of_the_United_States_Code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_35_of_the_United_States_C...&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Again - this article is attempting to state &quot;oh because PDA existed, that means that everything related to &lt;i&gt;a device with a touchscreen and few buttons&lt;/i&gt; was obvious&quot;. but again, thats untrue.&lt;p&gt;I still believe - in additional the complex legal arguments - the comment below was one of greatest aspects that changed the lay-persons juror mind. Per the Apple lawyer Harold McElhinny&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&quot;In those three months, Samsung was able to copy Apple&apos;s 4-year investment in the iPhone, without taking any of the risks—because they were copying the world&apos;s most successful product ... No one is trying to stop them from selling smartphones, all we&apos;re saying is: make your own. Make your own designs, make your own phones, and compete on your own innovations.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drats</author><text>People don&apos;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&apos;t &quot;first&quot; the question is &quot;obvious&quot;. 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.&lt;p&gt;Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.</text></comment>