Comments on: Apple awarded key iPhone multitouch patent

A new patent that covers much of the iPhone's multitouch user interface has been awarded to Apple; is it planning to go after competitors?

[Johnnie0Sullivan]

Hmm....I guess the fact that HTC was out with a touch swipe interface a full year before the release of the iPhone doesn't count for much. Apple has a long history of borrowing other people's ideas and then repackaging them and convincing everyone that they are their own. The trend continues.

[oneAwake]

People, people, the iphone and the Palm Pre do not use the same screen, there are many types of Capacitive multi-touch. The Pre uses True Touch Capacitive, check out the link below:

http://download.cypress.com/truetouch/CY8CTMG110.pdf

For the record the iphone uses A type of multi-touch, Apple was given a patent for "A" type of multi-touch!

Also, here are patents that were given before Apple, just to name a few:

US Patent 6492979 - Dual sensor touchscreen utilizing projective-capacitive and force touch Issued on December 10, 2002

US Patent 6297811 - Projective capacitive touchscreen Issued on October 2, 2001

[AppleSuxLeo]

You sir are correct. A good analogy for the Mac fanboys goes like this:
All cars have windshield wipers. Brand A has a mechanism that wipes the windows well.
Brand B and others also have their own type of window wiping mechanism , but they all accomplish the task of wiping the windows. Even a Mac user should be able to understand this.
Do you really think Jon Rubinstein (Podfather , iMac designer , etc) would put out a product without doing his homework ? Give me a break.

[Xenovic]

This is one of those strange realms of "Intellectual Property vs the Spirit of Competition."

I don't have any problem with Apple, and I don't have any problem with Palm. I have a Palm phone that I liked a lot when I first got it, but its tired and ready to be replaced (contract's up in May). So I go out and look at phones, I am a shopper for the technology that best suites my needs.

All around me I see WinMo, I see the old OS Palms, I find G1s, and the Blackberries and then there's the iPhone. Well honestly, The iPhone is pretty fancy with its squeezy browser and its flicky apps. In fact prior to CES I was pretty much set that I was going to be buying iPhones in June. Does the do everything I want it to? Well, no.. but really do any of the phones do everything? Of course not.

The one thing that these phones all tend to do is build on the technology of the others.
Many of the early smart phones had keyboards, then someone came along and took the keyboard away and innovated the market. It used to be a pain to install an app (still is on WinMo) Blackberry made a way to download apps right onto the phone and that caught on, too. Apple brought on a squeezy web browser and now the other phones want one too. This is natural evolution.

WinMo 6.1 introduced Java Support, and Palm followed suit with a heavily Java based OS, so the natural next step should be Apple stepping out to the Java market.

In order for capitalism to succeed more opportunities have to be allowed for free competition and the patent office is coming a bit too close to stifling that, these days. This is likely a patent that will be squashed, but a legal injunction keeping Palm from selling in the states would likely end them... and the jobs that they currently furnish to their employees.
(The irony is that I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple buying Palm in the end...)

[pj-mckay]

It's all gone mad. We'll all be in trouble when they trace the owner of the power on button, and then we'll not be allowed to use the the power off button till we pay even more. Where will it end?

In any case I can remember Palm having much the same ************ with their handwriting/grafiti modes. It's a sad world if this sort of $hit is allowed to be endorsed and used against folk. I am totally for hardware and software patents but this is crazy. This is a concept; like turning pages, or walking. There is NOTHING to patent at this level, unless it's the specific code or hardware... and that can be replaced with something that does the same job. Can Apple really win friends and market by trying to enforce this? I dont think so.

[megustansalchichas]

more work for the lawyers! this is great, coming up with things that didn't exist before and then fighting about who came up with them first, and tons of people make money until the dust settles and then it's just one group of people making money but by then the next new thing comes out, i love this country! in other countries an executive would just hire a hit man and have pozole made out of the competition:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28868152/

[megustansalchichas]

ok that link died, try this one
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5586822.ece

[startouch]

THIS REALLY MAKES ME ANGRY !! THIS IS SOOO WRONG , I HAVE HAD "PALMS" FOR 10 YEARS THE I-PHONE & I-POD TOUCH LOOK LIKE A SLIMMER PALM EVEN THE ICONS ! I HOPE "ALL" TEC. COM'S. SUE ! THIS IS A HORRABLE MONOPOLY AND WILL STOP COMPITION AND INNOVATION (OH WELL I GUESS "ASIA" & "EUROPE" WILL HAVE ALL THE NEW TEC. AND WELL BE LEFT BEHIND AGAIN! ) CAN WE STOP IT ?

[Macbrewer]

There was no market for smart phones before the iPhone. Emil phones like blackberry, sure, but they were not very smart. For example, the stupid dedicated keyboard.

And, yes, Word most definitely started on a Mac. That is, the version you are using started on a Mac, unless you are using the old DOS version. :-)

I know, it was about that time I got my first Mac. I thought I already knew Word and Excel. Well, yeah, but only a few concepts (like font/paragraph/section formatting) were common between the two. And we all know Microsoft basically just likes to move commands around to make it look as if they are doing --SOMETHING-- but the modern Office apps--they started on Mac, no question.

No big deal though. They weren't that good, the only way they became a defacto standard was because Microsoft kept making any of their competitors software incompatible with the their OS.

There used to be a LOT of good wordprocessors before microsoft ran all of them out of business illegally (and got away with it of course).