[Nicole060]

As someone who has owned a pre-iPhone phone with a touchscreen, and seen another one in the hand of a friend, no, what made the iPhone the iPhone is NOT obvious.

For the love of god, my LG Prada was so shitty I had to hit a 2px scrollbar with my thumb to scroll in the contact list. I can't contain the nervous laugh whenever some ignorant who never touched the device link to wikipedia proud of their attempt at mocking Apple. Web browsing on a touchscreen is a real PITA without something like the double tap making a paragraph fit the whole screen automatically too.

Like it or not but the iPhone, as a whole package, without just singling out a feature here and there, was a real innovation, a breath of fresh air that opened a new market and has been copied to death by some companies like Samsung. I hated my LG Prada but instantly loved my iPhone the day I bought one and I wasn't anything like an Apple fanboy.

[BenoitEssiambre]

"the iPhone, as a whole package, without just singling out a feature here and there, was a real innovation, a breath of fresh air"

Ah but then you admit, it's "the whole package" that is the real innovation, the individual pieces were really not that novel and a lot of them not even from Apple. Six months or a year later, as the technology became more available, most of these pieces would have crept in other smartphones. Apple didn't invent much except perhaps an internal process using exceptional attention do details and an execution speed that allowed them to iterate more and polish the final product better than their competitors.

They were more than well compensated for this since they dominated the high end smartphone market for 5 years and became the most valuable company ever. They do not, on top of this mountain-high pile of money, need nor deserve a progress halting, 20 year monopoly based on technology that would have appeared anyways on the market 6 months or a year later (albeit probably in a less polished way).

Proof that smartphone technology was getting cheap and the idea of making a smartphone with few buttons was the next obvious step in computing is that some guys in 2006 were even thinking about making it as an opensource project:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Cheap-hackable-Linux...

In fact, I remember thinking when the first iPhone was revealed that Apple seemed to have somewhat copied the openmoko project. I was glad that a company with large teams of engineers like Apple was having a go at this type of smartphone idea since I wanted an openmoko type phone and I wasn't sure a small team of volunteers would have enough resources to do a good job at it.

[veemjeem]

> Ah but then you admit, it's "the whole package" that is the real innovation

Actually I would say scrolling by itself was an amazing innovation. Every phone/tablet/pda out there had to implement a scrolling interface for lists, whether it be for contacts, todo items, or call logs, however nobody has created a scrolling interface as usable as Apple's first scrolling interface on the iphone. Their flick scrolling with inertia was probably the first time I wasn't in pain scrolling through a thousand entries.

How can anyone disagree about scrolling being novel? If it was not a novel idea, Nokia should have implemented this on their phones so it wouldn't take a thousand button presses to get to the bottom of my contact list.

When something is novel, every instance prior to the invention would implement it (scrolling) in various different ways, and after the invention it would all be implemented in the same way that emulates the invention. I can't think of an instance where someone implements scrolling without a flick + inertia nowadays.

Hence, the invention brought something new to the table that was never used prior to its existence, and everyone now copies because they feel it is the proper way to do something.

Here's a simplistic straw-man: Prior to the transistor, everyone used vacuum tubes. After the transistor invention, everyone uses transistors.

Everyone used standard scrollbars on handhelds before Apple's invention, however they now use flick/inertia scrolling and nobody goes back to standard scrollbars.

[Nicole060]

Yeah right.

The iPhone is so obvious that your links shows a screen with scrollbars and I presume it worked the same way as it did on my godawful POS of a LG Prada : you probably had to hit the bars to scroll.

Still I admit that Openmoko had the decency to make the scrollbars bigger and give us arrow buttons widgets, which probably made it easier to use than the 2px bar of the LG Prada.

Anyway the openmoko is not a valid comparison point when we're talking about what Samsung did to Apple when they made the Galaxy S, Touchwiz (Android on samsung is not the same as vanilla Android), copied the (look) of the dock connector, AC adapter, packaging.. Openmoko doesn't have anything of the stuff that made the iPhone feel like magic.

Remember that the first Android phone didn't even support multitouch, for god's sake. And it was a year later after the release of the first iPhone. A year later and they still couldn't do anything close to it, and people call the iPhone obvious ? have some decency, please. The iPhone 3g has been released BEFORE the first android phone and it was already the second iteration of the iPhone. And the first Android phone (HTC Dream) was so far from being like the iPhone it isn't even funny. Compared to what the Galaxy S has become.

[mattmcknight]

You are basically saying the iPhone was of higher quality- things worked better. This is true, but you can't patent quality.

[Nicole060]

Are you saying there is nothing to patent about the implementation of gestures on your touchscreen, as opposed to hitting widgets like scrollbars ? You couldn't be more wrong.

And people who cite things like the people who did multitouch with an array of cameras obviously don't understand patents. Patents are not about an idea but an implementation. The earlier multitouch stuff had nothing to do with the multitouch on a capacitive screen.

[voyou]

"Are you saying there is nothing to patent about the implementation of gestures on your touchscreen, as opposed to hitting widgets like scrollbar?"

Aren't touchscreen gestures just mouse gestures where a touchscreen replaces the mouse? That seems like an obvious amalgamation of two pieces of prior art.

EDIT: That doesn't mean that particular aspects of the implementation of touch gestures on iOS aren't patentable, but AFAIK that hasn't been what Apple has been suing on the basis of.

[gnaffle]

That's why Apple patented a lot of the small details that make the iPhone better, instead of just patenting quality.

[jsz0]

You can definitely patent the specific things that makes it better and perhaps even arrange a bunch of things that, by themselves, would not be patentable into the right order to make one bigger thing that is patentable.

[veemjeem]

You should google "design patent". If the quality can be distinguished by an ordinary person, then the design patent is upheld. I think everyone on HN thinks patents are "utility patents".