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Comment by Legion | Hacker News Reader

There's plenty of use of the color black, rectangular shapes, rounded corners, and centered screens in the "before iPad" group.

View on HN

In general, the tablet design language seems to have evolved over time. Here are the four pre-iPad generations of Nokia's internet tablets:

770 (2005): http://www.flickr.com/photos/bergie/231781513/

N800 (2007): http://www.flickr.com/photos/bergie/399708279/

N810 (2007): http://www.flickr.com/photos/bergie/2290709295/

N900 (2009): http://www.flickr.com/photos/bergie/4706326072/

In those pictures you can also see some common tablet features like on-screen keyboards, video chat, maps, and even augmented reality.

All of the Nokia tablets came with a stylus but were mostly used with fingers. The stylus was handy for web browsing - for example, on the iPad I have to zoom HN quite a bit before I can reliably hit the up/down voting buttons.

At some point Nokia even introduced a feature where the UI elements would sense whether you're using stylus or finger, and would size themselves accordingly.

> for example, on the iPad I have to zoom HN quite a bit before I can reliably hit the up/down voting buttons.

This is because HN's design and HTML code suck. It's unreadable and inconvenient on laptops too.

Sure, but it isn't by far the only website with small hit areas

That's why I use this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oieefcckcbbgniifdh...

And they all run Windows with a stylus. No capacitive touch screen, no custom app-based OS. It's a qualitative difference.

Incorrect. Once capacitive screens that could detect a finger were invented, they were immediately incorporated into tablet PCs. Many tablets incorporated an active digitizer underneath a resistive one, allowing both fingers and styli. As for a custom app-based OS, look no further than any tablet running Windows Mobile, like the HTC Shift X9500.

http://pastebin.com/6NKYY3Bf

Mis-pasted wrong link?

I don't think the design patent covers the software or even the hardware. It's about looks, exclusively.

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