Sorry, but the idea is so obvious that the burden of proof lies with those who suggest that an iPhone-like device isn't inevitable once capacitive multitouch tech appears.
Or do people think Apple invented that, too?
And make no mistake, it's ideas, and not implementations, that are behind these ludicrous half-billion dollar patent judgments. Patents were not supposed to work that way, but they do.
If you don't agree with the patent system, the only solution is to lobby to get the laws changed. Why should Apple voluntarily withdraw if all their competitors (e.g. Samsung, Google, Microsoft) sure as hell aren't going to?
Actually the burden of proof is on you to substantiate your claims. If the idea was so obvious, why was it so widely ridiculed in the industry for having no hardware keyboard? It was widely predicted to be a failure.
It was ridiculed only by people like Steve Ballmer who were either whistling past the graveyard or just plain dense.
It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.
To me, and to most other people I hung out with at the time, it was very obvious that physical keyboards on cell phones were not going to be A Thing for very much longer. Everything else that happened simply followed from that.
> It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.
How exactly does this contribute to the discussion,
To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.
To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the patent in question. It seems very important to the people in this thread to deflect from any discussion of the actual case. I wonder why that might be?
So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?
To bolster the argument of inevitability, as opposed to divine inspiration worthy of eternal reward (or at least 20 years).
The iPhone depended on a single gating technology: touchscreens that didn't suck. Those appeared on the market a couple of years before the iPhone, but none of the major players took advantage of them. Apple did, and the rest is deterministic history.
Yes, some people laughed at touchscreen UIs. Yes, they were wrong to do so. Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.
Or do people think Apple invented that, too?
And make no mistake, it's ideas, and not implementations, that are behind these ludicrous half-billion dollar patent judgments. Patents were not supposed to work that way, but they do.