>“As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”
What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
It’s why analysts that just focuses on one obvious feature - a touch screen - misses the point so badly. If a touch screen was all that mattered, why didn’t the Android team copy one of the previous touch screen phones instead?
There were number of Phone that existed with several of those styles.
How many people know Verizon Had a decent app store (Apps developed with Brew) in US before iPhone? This included similar testing that you see for AppStore TODAY.
So any reasonable person should be able to conclude that Apple did not invent rounded corners?
None had exactly the same design nor look & feel as the iPhone.
Which phone are you referring to ?
Still using it in the same way as a mouse. The thing that set the iOS UI apart is direct manipulation of the UI. E.g. instead of using a scrollbar/arrows to scroll, you use your finger to move the page around. Instead of clicking a checkbox you move a slider. Instead of clicking a "zoom in" button you 'stretch' the photo out using your fingers. etc.
It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.
I do. I think it was a revolutionary improvement. It's so much more intuitive to use, it's the one thing that makes your grandma able to use an iPad. It's hard to overstate how important this was. The fact that now you know about it, it seems obvious and not a big deal emphasises how big of an improvement it was.
> It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.
Of course not, it wasn't invented yet so they didn't know the Palm Pilot lacked this.
You miss the point: Most people rejected the Palm Pilot before seeing how you interacted with it at all. The idea that how you interact with the device makes such a big difference is flawed to a large extent because these devices demonstrated quite clearly that there were other issues that stopped mass market adoption of these devices before people even bothered to figure out how you actually interacted with them.
My understanding for why Google wanted Android and open handset alliance is the fragmentation of mobile at that time: it took too much effort to get Google maps on all these different J2ME (I think I got the name right) devices.
Anyone that tried to make an Android app run properly across Android devices, specially Samsung ones, knows that the fragmentation issues aren't gone.
Yes, they are both rectangles. But there were massive differences aside from the capacitive touch.
It tends to bring this pointless debate to a quick end.
Edit: found them.
Before: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsu...
After: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsu...
Not really.. all the before photos are for keypad phones. All the after photos are for touchscreen phones. I would argue that if you are going to design a pure touchscreen phone, you are likely to end up with an 'iPhone-like' design. Case in point is the LG Prada which was unveiled before the iPhone.
Sure it had an impact on design, but given a couple of years, they would have gotten there(hardware-wise).
I'm saying that because if you look at the years, the first one goes:
2004 - 2005 - 2006 - iPhone (2007)
And the second one goes:
iPhone (2007) - 2010 - 2011
If they want to prove the point they should not be disingenuous and show some Samsung phones from 2008 and 2009. I doubt that Samsung transitioned from the old design to the new one instantly in 2007, via their magic iPhone cloning machine.
Also, the iPhone was more of a forcing function than anything. If you look at a longer term evolution, screens were getting bigger and bigger and the keyboard smaller and smaller. The iPhone shaved 5-10 years from that evolution by shaming complacent phone producers into moving forward at a decent pace.
Parent post didn't say the phones looked the same. The iPhone refined a lot of existing functionality.
I'm no Samsung fanboy, I use Apple products, we're a 4 iPhone house, but this all just seems like petty stuff.
>There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction.
Regardless of the merit of this claim in regards to what exists in text, tradition, or practice, it, in my opinion, shows that the legal system is effectively a huge game where the rules matter more than the concepts of which the game's existence is justified (such concepts are right and wrong, harm, guilt and innocence).
If you are about to be executed for a crime you were convicted of, but have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of your innocence, that alone is not worth demanding judicial consideration.
If the rules by which we murder people in cold blood are less nonsensical than the most recent version of D&D, then what hopes does far more mundane and boring issues like patents have?
> The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing.
Courts and laws change slowly, and changing them requires sustained, steady pressure. But they do change and adapt as their shortcomings are identified.
This is what I call "losing the forest for the trees", and for some reason I think is extremely common among engineering folks. It's not just rounded corners, or a grid of icons, but rounded corners and a grid of icons that looked and felt extremely similar to the iPhone.
I think it's still a very valid debate to say whether or not these kinds of things should be patentable, but lets not pretend that Samsung just happened along to a similar design. They were clearly copying the overall gestalt of the iPhone.
This stuff should not be patentable, not even in aggregate. Full stop.
[1] https://hackernoon.com/apples-icons-have-that-shape-for-a-ve...
Anyway, shouldn't this be copyright law and not patent law?
Did reasonable amount of people confuse a Braun Pocket radio with the Apple iPod?
The argument at play here seems to be: you can make something that looks like a Braun device if Braun doesn't already have a design-patented device that does the same thing. And you can make a device that does exactly the same thing as a Braun device as long as you don't try to make your device look confusingly similar to Braun's device. What you can't do is make a direct substitute for a design-patented Braun device, and then go out of your way to clone the design so that people have a hard time telling the difference between the two.
Another simple way to look at this (it's incomplete, but might settle the issue for you) is that a lot of people pick their phone based on how it looks.
I guess I really just don't care. If people are buying products based on style, then anyone should be able to produce a product with that style, and you can't argue that people aren't getting what they want. "Style" should not be patentable, or we're entering a dystopia where you have to figure out who to pay royalties to when you decide what color tshirt to wear.
bought a Samsung phone instead of an Apple phone because they thought both phones basically did the same thing is also unconvincing. Salespeople say this kind of shit all the time no matter what the product looks like. "Our version is better!" - it's practically their job. Except in egregious cases of salesperson misbehavior (ie fraud), the customer isn't confused about the origin of the product. Uninformed customers will make uninformed decisions, caveat emptor.
I've owned both early iPhone and Samsung models and seriously they look and feel very different. The whole thing is a joke, and just irrational Apple "thermonuclear" sulking and foot-stomping.
Don't forget that before the iPhone, there were a TON of competing models of regular phone on the market, often very similar. Nobody was stomping their legal foot and sulking about patent violation for how the corner of a phone was bevelled or not. So please stop apologising for Apple's ego-fuelled temper tantrums.
It's flawed logic to say it's a widespread problem that people "accidentally buy a Samsung" because a salesperson lied to your grandmother. That's an edge case that means nothing.
The salesperson could have convinced the grandmother to buy a "Sinclair iPhone by Timex", assuming it was packaged into something roughly phone-shaped. The problem here isn't the appearance of the product.
I will happily point the finger at any tech giant when it does wrong, but Samsung didn't do anything to warrant years of court battles and accusations. It's tiring to hear people defend Apple's sideshow legal agenda.
The "touch screen phone" was inevitable, and was always going to be something with round-ish corners, flat, with icons. The shape is too fundamental to the ergonomics of such a device. There's too little room for difference in design, relative to the objective of making such a device comfortable to hold. I had the Nokia N9 for awhile, and the pointy/squared corners were not a great feature. They probably wanted to avoid rounded corners, which is a ridiculous situation where consumers lose out.
"Hey, this Samsung phone is cheaper and looks the same, I'll just buy it instead" is probably more common than we'd think.
Look at this from Apple's perspective: they spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to create what was at the time a step change in mobile hardware, and then a bunch of other companies went "thanks for the 'inspiration'" and immediately began profiting from blatant copies of that original work. I'd be pissed, too.
It's childish for Apple to expect to have it all for themselves, then sue anyone who gets close to "rounded corners". Like if Ford sued anyone else for putting 4 wheels on a vehicle body. The Samsung phone is not a "clone", by any stretch. People saying this have swallowed the Apple rhetoric.
And lastly, the technology in the iPhone was only possible because of electronics and software that was in part developed not by Apple, but by others. Apple should give it a rest, enjoy their riches. And, they should NOT build an Apple store at Fed Square in Melbourne Australia, we don't want it.
I feel the same sense of empathy for the companies Apple occasionally steals stuff from, especially Palm. So much of modern iOS (and Android, but Google hired Matthias...) is cribbed from webOS that it makes me a bit sad.
Only in a courtroom in Silicon Valley. And with a jury headed by a jury foreman with very questionable opinions and patents himself. He had to be told to shut up after the verdict because he was going around interviewing saying things that tainted the verdict not so greatly.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1267
"Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than that of its ancestor of three hundred years earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had an unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation - for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode."
These are arbitrary choices, and that's precisely why it isn't rent-seeking to protect them. There is an infinite number of arbitrary designs that would achieve the same function; the only reason to use the ones Apple chose is to try and trade on the consumer goodwill Apple has created with its products, or confuse people into associating your product with Apple's. Those aren't legitimate bases for competition; they are free-riding (a concept at least as important as "rent seeking").
The LG Prada was shown off before the introduction of the iPhone. To imply that the iPhone was polarizing/radical and that the LG Prada was not is ridiculous IMO.
https://www.engadget.com/2007/06/29/apple-iphone-vs-lg-prada...
If it was so radical and ground-breaking, how come LG are an also-ran Android OEM and not the most valuable company ever?
It's an asinine argument as it takes the most superficial elements, such as a full touchscreen, conveniently ignoring the actual things that made the iPhone so innovative, such as multitouch UX, proper web browser, full featured operating system, exclusive carrier partnerships and more.
Here's what the LG was actually like:
* No multitouch
* Flash-based UI
* T9 keyboard – even though it was a touchscreen it still used predictive text
* Basic browser, no pinch to zoom
The reason people bring up the LG Prada is because it proves the form factor of a touch screen phone with a bottom button existed before the introduction of the iPhone.
>If it was so radical and ground-breaking, how come LG are an also-ran Android OEM and not the most valuable company ever?
Not all radical and ground breaking designs succeed. The Prada's software was also far from revolutionary or memorable for that matter.
>It's an asinine argument as it takes the most superficial elements, such as a full touchscreen, conveniently ignoring the actual things that made the iPhone so innovative, such as multitouch UX, proper web browser, full featured operating system, exclusive carrier partnerships and more.
About the only relevant thing you mentioned was having a multi-touch UX on a phone - a technology they didn't invent, but just made popular.
> If it was so radical and ground-breaking, how come LG are an also-ran Android OEM and not the most valuable company ever?
The LG Prada example only destroys the "Apple invented rounded corners" argument.
iPhone was groundbreaking. Rhe lawsuits afterwards were ridiculous IMO.
It doesn't matter who invented what first, Samsung deliberately infringed Apple's design patents and were found to do so by the court. As I understand it, design patents are different to normal patents in that prior art is not a consideration.
Samsung could have gone in so many different directions with the design. Instead they came up with something that even their own lawyers had trouble distinguishing from an iPhone.