Apple Counter-Sues Motorola Over Touchscreen Patents 201
Earlier this month, we discussed news that Motorola had sued Apple, alleging infringement of 18 patents involving the iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. In response, Apple has now launched a pair of lawsuits alleging that Motorola is the infringing party, pointing to a number of patents involving touchscreen displays and multi-touch technology, and also methods for interacting with settings and data on a device. Apple wants the court to award them damages and prevent Motorola from continuing to sell the offending devices, which include the Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, BackFlip, Devour i1, Devour A555, Cliq, and Cliq XT.
Re:Poor lawyers (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmm? Apple's products are refined, but technologically innovative? No.
As for why Apple fanboys love patents ... if you had any experience with fanboys you would know all hardware fanboys love patents. If you look at consoles or graphic card fanboys it works exactly the same. Microsoft in general (with exception for their consoles) does not have fanboys in quite the same way as Apple because it wasn't a vertically integrated software/hardware company for the most part ... and software patents are boring.
Before Apple got into mobile devices their fanboys didn't care much about patents either.
get rid of multitouch already (Score:4, Interesting)
Multitouch is a gimmick, something Apple can use to distinguish themselves from the rest. It's like their menu bar and their Finder.
Anybody who thinks that multitouch helps usability hasn't tried explaining it to their mother. And even for experienced users, it's an exercise in frustration: it works in some apps and not in others, it does different things, and you need to cover up even more of the screen with your hand. Furthermore, it doesn't carry over to pen-based input, and as the number of handwriting and drawing apps on App Store shows, people want pens.
Let Jobs pursue his insane obsessions. Google should focus on usability, do everybody a favor, and eliminate multitouch from Android.
Re:you're totally missing the point (Score:3, Interesting)
What you're now talking about is gesture recognition, not multi-touch. And the only 2 gestures that require more than one touch are pinch-zoom and pinch-rotate. Scrolling is not connected to multi-touch at all.
As to the patent claims, 2 are mostly about multi-touch, one partly about gestures, and 4 not related to touch screens or gestures at all.
I know what I'm talking about. You don't.
Re:Poor lawyers (Score:3, Interesting)
Those aren't particularly good examples if you're trying to wow us with technological innovation.
The first one isn't even an innovation, it's just expensive and inferior in a couple ways some people find very important. Overall a good idea, but it isn't like they created a new manufacturing process to pull it off. It's just a hollowed out piece of aluminum instead of a molded piece of plastic.
Magsafe is cool, and I like it very much, but I wouldn't really call it a "technological innovation", just a clever idea. Worthy of a patent, but not exactly a game changer in any respect.
Mac Mini you might have something, except there were thin clients before it which had similar capability (though intended to connect to a larger machine over the network) - it was more of a new use of old tech. Good idea, not really innovative though.
Apple's big innovations are in the application of technology, not the creation of it. iPod/iTunes - the technology was nothing new, but the application was unique and superior, which is why the combination still dominates the portable music player market. The iPhone was nothing new either, smartphones have been around almost a decade, but targeting the retail phone market was new (at least in the US), and the slick iPhone OS has spawned quite a lot of new tech. The iPad is doing the exact same thing.
I'd say they are good at bringing technology to market by making it really useful and attractive to the end user. They aren't particularly good at generating new technology themselves though.