[Nicole060]

If it was so obvious then why did it take a company that had NO history in making cell phones to make a good one with a usable touchscreen and gestures ?

Nokia couldn't do it. RIM couldn't do it. Samsung couldn't do it. LG couldn't do it. (LG did make a touchscreen, and I owned one before I bought an iPhone, and it sucked hardcore)

And they were on that market way before Apple.

Cry me a river if it hurts your feelings that Apple goes to defend their innovation.

[bornhuetter]

The market was waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become viable. You can't use multitouch properly on resistive screens (or non-touchscreen devices). Apple pounced as soon as capacitive screens became viable - albeit extremely expensive at the time. The first iPhone was "ahead of its time" in the sense that the market wasn't really ready for it. The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn't until the app store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone.

No-one really thought to patent the obvious design decisions that would come with the viability of a large capacitive touchscreen - rectangular, large screen, few physical buttons, multitouch gestures such as pinch to zoom (that already existed elsewhere).

Apple are absolute masters at combining existing technology into an attractive package. They also have excellent timing at bringing products to market (just before the market is ready for them - see original iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air).

But to say that these "innovations" wouldn't have happened anyway is disingenuous - no competent observer seriously believes that the market would not have moved on to large capacitive touchscreen devices over the last 5 years.

Apple deserve plenty of credit for their OS animations, smoothness of UI and (either praise or damnation depending on your point of view) the curated app store. They don't deserve credit for "inventing the capacitive touchscreen phone".

[gnaffle]

If the market was just waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become available, why did it take all the others years to come up with anything competitive after the iPhone launched?

Why didn't they all have capacitive iPhone look-alikes ready in the lab then?

Isn't it more reasonable to assume that the mobile market would have stayed roughly as it had the previous 10 years, with incremental improvements in screens, displays etc?

Apple isn't credited with the first capacitive touchscreen phone, but I think they should be credited with making the first usable, mass market touchscreen smartphone.

[bornhuetter]

> Why didn't they all have capacitive iPhone look-alikes ready in the lab then?

The Samsung evidence showed that they did. Not as good as the iPhone, certainly, but they were obviously all thinking about it.

> Apple ... should be credited with making the first usable, mass market touchscreen smartphone.

I completely agree with this. But they don't deserve a monopoly on it.

> Isn't it more reasonable to assume that the mobile market would have stayed roughly as it had the previous 10 years, with incremental improvements in screens, displays etc?

No. Not at all. The technology had been rapidly improving, and we would have seen phones with large capacitive touch screens, and features such as "pinch to zoom on a phone" anyway. Sure the implementation may have been different, but the idea that the market would not have moved on in 10 years is absurd.

[gnaffle]

What evidence was presented that Samsung had a similar phone in the works in 2007? One with a capacitive touchscreen and a user interface optimized for finger touch?

For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it, but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future?

I didn't say the market wouldn't move. Of course it would, but probably with incremental improvements. Why? Because mobile user interfaces changed very little before the iPhone arrived.

All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus. Even new contenders like Maemo and Android were initially designed this way. Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually, but I think it's odd to think that the transition to all-display touchscreen phones would have happened at the exact same pace if the iPhone had not been introduced, and that Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

[bornhuetter]

> Why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future?

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus.

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually

So we basically agree.

When I first saw the iPhone I thought it was the way of the future. But I thought the current form was awful. When the G1 came out it was even worse than the iPhone. The market simply wasn't ready yet; but Apple got in there with something barely usable for a price that a few early movers could afford.

Over time, both Apple and Google refined their systems into amazing, world changing devices.

There were two obvious ways of building these phones - 1. with menus 2. with icons. That is the way all feature phones that I know of worked. Google added widgets to this, and eventually Microsoft came up with the completely new idea of tiles.

> I think it's odd to think that ... Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

I never said anything remotely like that. It was entirely intentional that they put together the iPhone and brought it to market at the exact point in time that it became viable. That's why they are the most valuable company in the world. They deserve the huge success they have had, but, again, they don't deserve a monopoly.

[gnaffle]

So Apple brought it to market at the exact point in time that it became viable. The other companies were "waiting" as you say, so why did they wait so long? Didn't they see that the technology was about to become viable?

I don't buy that theory. By the sales of the first iPhone, the market was obviously ready. Had it been "barely usable" it would have flopped completely.

Capacitive touch screens use the same technology as touchpads, and I haven't seen any proof that those screens were too expensive before 2006 and that technological advancements broght the price down after that.

What I do think is that Apple was willing to bet on touchscreens and place bulk orders that made the price come down, whereas other companies happy with the status quo and unwilling to redesign their mobile operating systems to fit a new technology.

[catch23]

> Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

Hm, I don't think the reason competitors had their own operating system and stylus-based touch screens had anything to do with the market being ready for touch screens or not -- nobody created something that was usable, so of course the market didn't adapt to it. Bear with me on my small straw-man argument here: It's kind of like couchsurfing.com existed before airbnb.com, but few people let random strangers stay at their home before airbnb existed. You could say that "the market wasn't ready" or you could say that airbnb executed in a way that transformed the market. If Apple did not create the intuitive interfaces for the iPhone, we might still say "the market isn't ready for large touch screens".

[stanleydrew]

    For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it,
    but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was
    that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen
    phones would dominate the future?

Note that obviousness of an idea and obviousness of the quality of that idea are two entirely different things. It is possible for two companies to have an obvious idea at the same time, but one doesn't think it's quite obvious that it's a good idea while the other does.

For example, many of us here on HN would agree that tv/movie video content streamed over the internet was an obvious idea even in the late 90s. But it wasn't necessarily an obviously good idea at the time.

Maybe you would agree (or not, doesn't matter, the point stands, just pick a different company) that Netflix was the company that made watching videos online enjoyable. Should they enjoy a monopoly on streaming video content over the internet simply because they had the vision to decide that the idea was obviously good enough to pursue at the time that they did?

If they had patented streaming video, or something smaller, like auto-detecting your available bandwidth to optimize delivery quality, would we be so accepting of them trying to destroy Hulu or Amazon VOD in order to protect that "innovation"?

[seabee]

Revisionist, much? The G1 came out a few months after the iPhone 3G, the first iPhone to support third-party apps.

[gnaffle]

So? The G1 launched in October 2008, over 1,5 years after the first iPhone, and it didn't even have multi-touch enabled.

So my question is still, why weren't competitors further along in utilizing capacitive touchscreens if these advancements were so obvious in 2006?

[regularfry]

Because while it may have been obvious that it would happen eventually, nobody wanted to bet on when. It was safer to build the next iteration on known tech rather than gamble on being able to force the market.

[tjoff]

If the market was just waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become available, why did it take all the others years to come up with anything competitive after the iPhone launched?

Because apple was the only one that hadn't invested in anything else. Simple as that.

[gnaffle]

My point exactly. :)

[tjoff]

Your point seem to imply that innovation was required, mine that it was trivial.

[gnaffle]

If it was that trivial, I would at least expect Google or Nokias Maemo to have come up with such an interface before 2007.

I don't think the work put in by FingerWorks, and then the work put in by Apple to create the iOS user interface was trivial at all. It may not have been groundbreaking compared to what came before (ie most had been demonstrated by researchers), but I think it's obvious that a lot of work and design decisions went into creating it.

[Nicole060]

Funny, I never said they invented the capacitive touchscreen, but that's apple haters for you. What they did that no one else did before is to put the right gestures, the right UI, environment to make it work. I had a LG Prada, it had a capacitive touchscreen so I obviously know Apple didn't invent it.. except the LG Prada was also behaving the same as Windows XP on a tablet. You use widgets like scrollbars instead of gesture everywhere. That's no iPhone.

"The first iPhone was an expensive PoS" ? it was the first phone with a good web browser, that's already quite something in itself. I can't imagine browsing the web on a phone without double tap to fit a paragraph, pinch to zoom and a good engine like Webkit. That made it a feature phone, more than a smartphone, at the time, with the lack of things like installable software, but it was a damn good feature phone, and for those who use lot of webapps, it was probably better than most smartphones too.

For the record, I hate the app store. I hate not being able to install software outside of the curated app store. But I give credit where it's due, even if there are a lot of things I hate about Apple, they did make the one touch phone that was actually usable, as opposed to POS like LG Prada or Samsung Croix (pre-android touchscreens) interface.

It is really obvious looking at some of the ac adapters and dock connectors that Samsung intended to copy the whole appearance of the earlier iPhones to ride on Apple's coattails. Samsung tried to copy everything from the UI to the trade dress to patented technology. They behaved like shady Chinese companies making cheap knock offs.

[lotharbot]

> "that's apple haters for you"

Comments like this do not add to the discussion.

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names." - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[jonhendry]

"Comments like this do not add to the discussion."

You'd have a point if that was the extent of the response.

[lotharbot]

The very next line of the guidelines reads:

> "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

[parasubvert]

"The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn't until the app store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone."

Huh? Market wasn't ready? This is completely revisionist fantasy. In 2007, it was the best overall phone on the market, period, and the market was ready. People lined up around the block to drop $499 to $599 on a locked phone. They sold over 1 million phones in their first two and a half months. When they dropped the 8GB price to $399, they sold another 3 million phones through the Fall of 2007.

All evidence points to Apple bringing the capacitive touchscreen phone to market years before anyone else would have. That's what innovation is. Not invention, no, but only geeks and historians really care about invention. Innovation in the market is what enables people to actually be able to buy and use things.

[bornhuetter]

> This is completely revisionist fantasy.

Revisionist? No. Personal opinion? Sure.

I personally remember the iPhone coming out and thinking it was awful. Fucking awful. And so did everyone I knew. When the G1 came out it was even worse. In my opinion, the only people that bought these awful phones were, to put it politely, "early movers".

> That's what innovation is. Not invention, no.

You're not really arguing against me. Apple deserve credit and riches for bringing a phone to market that people wanted. They don't deserve a monopoly. As you said, they didn't really "invent" anything

> only geeks and historians really care about invention

Maybe that's the way things should be. But right now the courts are involved, and the US courts (in contrast to some other courts) are saying that Apple have an exclusive right to features such as "pinch to zoom on a phone" that Apple didn't even invent.

[parasubvert]

> Revisionist? No. Personal opinion? Sure. I personally remember the iPhone coming out and thinking it was awful. Fucking awful. And so did everyone I knew.

I had the opposite experience. So did everyone I knew - they wanted one, badly. So did millions of others.

My point was that it was dubbed the "JesusPhone" in 2007, not 2008. You're entitled to your opinion, of course.

> They don't deserve a monopoly. As you said, they didn't really "invent" anything

If they have valid patents, then yes, they deserve a temporary monopoly on their approach. I don't like the terms of patents, they should be shorter. But I do think they exist for a reason.

> But right now the courts are involved, and the US courts (in contrast to some other courts) are saying that Apple have an exclusive right to features such as "pinch to zoom on a phone" that Apple didn't even invent.

They invent the first implementation of pinch to zoom ever, no. But they invented their approach to it as part of the broader innovation of the iPhone. That's what their patents are about, and they're so far deemed valid.

[mbell]

At the time the iphone was released I had one of the early HTC touch screen + slide out keyboard phones (Tytn or something like that). I recall laughing about the first iphones. Terrible e-mail support, no MMS, my year old phone had twice the capabilities. I couldn't understand why anyone would want such an expensive phone that was so functionally handicapped. What I didn't understand at the time was that the phone was never targeted at me, it was targeted at the general consumers who didn't care that it couldn't handle 5 e-mail accounts, VPN, etc, etc.

The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building. Apple lept ahead of the incumbents by realizing that a 'smartphone' could be a device every consumer wanted, rather than something that 'business folks' used. It wasn't so much that the incumbents couldn't have thought up something very similar, it was that they were caught up dealing with their current target markets: business people whom needed a blackberry or Wmobile phone with exchange support, whom didn't want change, they wanted a device that did its job and didn't require them to think about it. Its very difficult for a company to have the foresight to produce a product that they know their current customers will hate.

This is classic incumbents vs newcomers leap frogging, if you haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma" its worth checking out as it speaks directly to this pattern of development.

[slantyyz]

>> The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building

I disagree. I think the iPhone was the first smartphone that worked. The killer app on the phone was that it was the first phone to have a modern mobile browser.

It was not a browser that "didn't suck", it was a damned good browser. I had an Eee at the time, and I would pick the tiny-by-comparison screen of the iPhone's browser over the Eee any day. Why? Because the smart tap-to-zoom really used the screen real estate effectively. On the Eee, I'd have to use both horizontal and vertical scrolling to read some content.

No mobile browser before the iPhone's version of Safari even came remotely close.

[mbell]

The problem is that it didn't work as a 'smartphone' at all. It couldn't connect to blackberry's e-mail server, it couldn't connect to exchange, it couldn't send an MMS, it couldn't multitask or run background apps, it couldn't copy-paste. The iPhone was completely incapable of replacing existing smartphones for quite some time. It took blackberry's monopoly on 'push' e-mail dying and several updates to iOS before it could actually compete in the existing smartphone market.

What original iPhone is, was the first 'smartphone' like device that every consumer wanted.

[slantyyz]

>> couldn't connect to blackberry's e-mail server

>> it couldn't connect to exchange

>> it couldn't send an MMS

Didn't realize those were "must-haves" for a smartphone (an enterprise smartphone, maybe), because I never did that with any of my Windows Phones prior to getting an iPhone. I used my Windows Phone for my consulting work, by the way.

>> it couldn't multitask or run background apps

That's a double edged sword. That's one thing I hated on my Windows Phone. If you accidentally left the camera running in Windows Phone and sent it to the background, kiss your remaining battery life for the day goodbye.

>> it couldn't copy-paste

On my list of things to have on a smartphone, that's near the bottom. Yes, it was a pain, but far from being at the top of my list of "smartphone criteria"

>> The iPhone was completely incapable of replacing existing smartphones for quite some time

Well, I don't know about other people, but it replaced my Windows phone with no issue.

--edit--

To be clear, my primary business use of a smartphone is to manage my contacts, calendar and e-mail.

[mbell]

> Didn't realize those were "must-haves" for a smartphone (an enterprise smartphone, maybe), because I never did that with any of my Windows Phones prior to getting an iPhone. I used my Windows Phone for my consulting work, by the way.

The _vast_ majority of the smartphone market at the time was enterprise. The consumer smartphone business didn't exist in any significant way. I had a Wmobile phone and didn't use exchange either, however you and I were an extremely small minority. Apple's inovation was changing that, opening up a real consumer smartphone market.

[slantyyz]

Now that you bring it up, an interesting observation on my peer circle pre-iPhone:

All the enterprise users I knew had Blackberries. Everyone else I knew bought their own Windows Phones (and some Palm users) and most did not use Exchange. So maybe it could be argued that to some degree, Windows Phones were the only equivalent to a "consumer" smartphone at the time.

[freehunter]

*Windows Mobile phone

Windows Phone is completely different.

[slantyyz]

Oops, that's what I meant.

[zubiaur]

Actually, a obscure one did. Picsel browser, available on certain sony clie (palm OS) pdas had a very decent rendering engine for its time, tap to zoom and very smart gestures for zooming in and out (tap tap-drag). Miles ahead of the competition (ie, blazer and such...)

[ZeroGravitas]

Opera was pretty good and did all sorts of clever things to make browsing easier on phones, Nintendo Ds's , set-top boxes etc.

[thewileyone]

This is total rubbish. I had a HTC TyTn II and everything on it worked, yes even IE. I could do everything I could on a conventional browser on that phone.

Websites have changed to accomodate mobile browsers now so Safari looks like it works great. Travel back to 2007 and it would suck just like everything else.

[dredmorbius]

The Palm browser, as is noted, was actually pretty decent (I used it on the Centro).

The Android default browser (granted, appearing after Apple's) is superior on several points, in particular automatically zooming/scaling to the main body text of most web pages.

[drats]

People don't own ideas, they are granted temporary monopoly on real innovations to encourage their disclosure so that they, in the short term, and society, in the long term, can profit. The question isn't "first" the question is "obvious". I would argue with gestures already established and real touch screens a group of designers would quickly come up with a latch (horizontal stroke), a door handle (curving stroke), a safe padlock/rotary phone (circular motion) and general patterns (nine dots, some pattern dragging across them) rather easily. Spreading the fingers or the hand to zoom was already in minority report (2002). Double taps to do something different is already in the double clicking of the mouse.

Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.

[chipotle_coyote]

"Obvious" and "first" aren't identical, but they're not as separable as you're making them out to be. It's a stretch to say that a sliding door latch counts as prior art against a "slide to unlock" patent; that's essentially asserting that if there's any previous analogy to a claimed invention, the claim should be denied.

Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.

That's kind of the point of patents. Apple got market share by doing stuff that nobody else in the phone market was doing. There were a lot of similar (but not identical) things that other companies did in bits and pieces, but there simply wasn't anything else like the iPhone before the iPhone. (I'd argue that the most revolutionary thing the iPhone brought to the market had nothing to do with the patents, ironically; it had a web browser that just blew the doors off anything available in a device that size in 2007. The biggest sign that Apple got that right is how dominant WebKit-based browsers are on mobile devices now.)

A lot of the hatred directed against Apple over their "patent wars" seems to me to be misplaced: Apple is not abusing the patent system. They're not an Intellectual Ventures style patent troll. They're actually using the patents that they're fighting over. And it's very hard to make a successful argument that Samsung wasn't intentionally copying a lot of things about the iPhone, if only because they thought Apple got things right that previous Samsung models didn't. (In fact, it's hard to argue that it didn't work: the more Samsung made their phones like iPhones the more successful they got.)

There are very good arguments to be made against software patents, maybe even against trade dress patents, and maybe even against patents, period, as John Siracusa has suggested. Maybe patents just don't do what they were intended to do anymore. But it's not realistic to expect any technology company to take a bold stand against the patent system by refusing to sue over perceived patent violations. And it's not even very honest to keep portraying Apple as uniquely litigious in this area; Nokia and Motorola both initiated suits against Apple, and while Microsoft hasn't been going around suing everyone, they've just been collecting license fees on Android from manufacturers. By some estimates they've made more money on Android than Google has.

If there's a problem here--and I think there is--it's with the patent system. The Apple-Samsung battle is a symptom of the problem. Let's not mistake it for the disease.

[ricardobeat]

The latch is only obvious in retrospect; it involves the emulation of physical constraints that most non-engineers couldn't even describe succesfully (springy handle, locking at the end) and great resilience to unintended input.

If another manufacturer had made the iPhone, you would probably unlock it by pressing a sequence of keys. That's the most obvious design.

[rustynails]

I respectfully disagree. My thought process was 1. Passcode (alpha or numeric) 2. If I don't want a passcode, I need something else, and a single button won't do. Ok, drag something.

The conclusion is obvious. You could argue that I am biased, and it would be impossible for me to counter. However, IMHO, sliding something was the obvious answer.

[ricardobeat]

"drag something" was not a common interaction at the time, especially because there weren't any other products with touchscreens accurate enough for it (try to unlock a chinese %pad knockoff. they are 10x better than what existed in 2007). Remember, actually touching the screen was novelty.

[taligent]

Except that a single button WILL do. Because you still need to press it in order to wake the screen up on pretty much every phone on the market today.

Which begs the question why you wouldn't either go straight to the home screen or show a single continue button. Slide to unlock is not what most people would do in that situation.

[Blara]

I agree the latch is not a good comparison, but I did have "slide" to unlock on my walkman back in the day. (lock/unlock buttons)

[rayiner]

So one thing to understand about patent law. A combination of existing features can be novel if the combination together is novel. However, in that case, the protection is extended to the combination only, not the individual features.

Samsung isn't getting sued because Apple owns "pinch to zoom." That's not how you'd read the patent. What Apple owns is "pinch to zoom" in the context of a device containing a combination of all the other features. Samsung copied that device with that combination of features. With a device, I might add, that was changed from the default Android UI to look more like an iPhone.

[learc83]

>What Apple owns is "pinch to zoom" in the context of a device containing a combination of all the other features.

That's completely incorrect--read the patent. Apple owns pinch to zoom on a touchscreen, so long as that pinch to zoom allows you to pinch multiple times to continue to zoom.

Again apple owns an individual utility patent on what we consider pinch to zoom on touchscreens. If you use just that one feature you are infringing on their patent, and every android phone is infringing on that patent.

[mattmcknight]

But that's not what the patents were for that were at issue in this case. They did it better, that's why they won in the marketplace. Now that other competitors are catching up in quality, they are turning to the illegitimate patents they were awarded to abuse the world legal system to go after them.

[alok-g]

Obviousness here is being talked about with regards to "patents". It is highly possible to create a new good design without creating new inventions.

That Nokia, RIM and others could not do it does not necessarily imply that Apple had some really unique inventions that enabled it to do so. (That Apple claims to be so is a different thing. That Samsung willfully copied their design elements is also a different thing.)

[drumdance]

Only Apple had the supply chain to deliver a product at a reasonable cost.

[Nicole060]

You can't be serious. Samsung has a far better supply chain than Apple. In fact, Samsung IS PART of Apple's supply chain.

But Samsung is not the kind of company that would take risks with a market and they'd rather ride on the coattails of those who are willing to push the innovation into the hands of the consumers, and it's not something specific to their mobile division, it's the same for their digital cameras, home appliances.. I've seen during the history of photography most of the big names doing something that may have impacted the market, while Samsung is just saying "hey, me-too!" months laters.

[drumdance]

How many small devices -- not television sets -- had Samsung delivered before 2010 when the Galaxy S was launched? How many iPods had Apple delivered before the iPhone?

To cite a simple example: the iPod disk drive system was based on exclusive access to Toshiba's then-new hardware. Apple did many, many deals of that nature, including outright acquisitions, to gain a technology advantage. Samsung has done a lot to keep up, but only after watching Apple do it first.

[taligent]

Sorry but I actually laughed when you said this. You couldn't be more wrong if you tried.

Apple was in NO way comparable to the likes of Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Motorola etc who had decades of pre-existing relationships in the mobile and component industries. Not to mention those companies were competing for lowest cost in some areas so had plenty of optimisation work already built into their supply chains.

[drumdance]

Is the iPhone an extension of the iPod, or conventional mobile technology? Apple did a hella lot to create the iPod supply chain and, because they sold direct to consumers instead of through carriers, knew a lot more about how to deliver the ideal experience.