If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone (ars technica)

Ars technica digs into the history of touchscreen interfaces and phones to show that Apple (and Android) built on the shoulders of giants. In particular, prior art is shown for many of the "innovations" claimed by Apple, like slide-to-unlock and the pinch gesture. "By February 2006, [Jeff] Han brought a number of these ideas together to create a suite of multitouch applications that he presented in a now-famous TED talk. He showed off a photo-viewing application that used the "pinch" gesture to re-size and rotate photographs; it included an on-screen keyboard for labeling photos. He also demonstrated an interactive map that allowed the user to pan, rotate, and zoom with dragging and pinching gestures similar to those used on modern smartphones."

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