Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 2, 2009 22:50 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Let me play devil's advocate for a minute... by mattdm
Parent article: Apple's touch-screen patent

actually, there are a LOT of people working on multitouch interfaces right now. Apple didn't invent a new technique, they just were the first ones to ship a high-volume product that uses it.

there may be specific details that they are the first ones to do, but things like 'a huristic to determine if the angle of the motion is steep enough to not be a horizontal scroll command' is hardly in that category.

to post comments

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 10, 2009 16:53 UTC (Tue) by bfeeney (guest, #6855) [Link] (2 responses)

Arguably they were the second. The LG Prada, a touch-screen phone, was
released three months before the iPhone was announced.

True, the iPhone uses some interesting touchscreen-based UI tricks (e.g.
pinch), but these two were invented by others, there was a video on youtube
showing an academic research demoing these techniques over two years before
the iPhone debuted.

Apple were the first to successfully create a product based on existing
techniques, not the first to invent those techniques. It's to Apple's credit
that they can exploit known techniques and the talent of their developers to
create great products; Microsoft and Google, despite employing similarly
skilled developers, have failed to create next-gen products (MS never got
beyond Windows+Office, Google has yet to get beyond Search+Ads).

The thing is though, ability to execute is not enough for a patent. It must
be new, innovative, and not at all obvious. None of these are true of that
scrolling
patent.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 12, 2009 14:59 UTC (Thu) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link] (1 responses)

"Arguably they were the second. The LG Prada, a touch-screen phone, was
released three months before the iPhone was announced."

Um, LG Prada was a touchscreen phone, but it was not MULTITOUCH. There has been several phones with touchscreens over the years, but none of them were multitouch.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Apr 20, 2010 14:41 UTC (Tue) by Desty (guest, #65496) [Link]

"Um, LG Prada was a touchscreen phone, but it was not MULTITOUCH. There has been several phones with touchscreens over the years, but none of them were multitouch."

So? The patent threat in question has no relevance to whether the phones are multitouch or not; you only need one finger to scroll in two-dimensions (or one, which is the issue at hand).