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Apple Patents Using Apps During Calls
bizwriter writes "Apple has had quite a week in patents for the iPhone, and it's only Tuesday. First was the victory at the International Trade Commission over HTC. And now there's a shiny new patent on switching to an app during a live phone call (#8,082,523). There may be non-infringing ways of doing something similar, but they probably will be clumsy in comparison."
Are reviewing Patents nowadays?
What they don't realise though is that shit like this puts people off. Certainly my 3 year old MBP is about ready for replacement whilst it still has some resale value and I am seriously considering whether to give my money to these asshats. Plenty of corporate grade laptops with the same quality for the same money and I'm as happy running Linux as I am OS X.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Apple could die like jobs.
Because this crap is getting silly.
Do the other applications on that phone change appearance when a phone call is in progress? It would seem not.
What the patent really is going after is the header during a phone call that says "touch to return to call" when you are in applications. I actually think working around this would be pretty easy for any Android device that had software buttons, because you could put the call indicator/return button there... they key is just modifying the UI of the running app during a phone call.
However, even though you can work around it it's still a stupid patent to have granted... The only problem is all of the big companies have such troves of patents now that will any of them be willing to give up the power a majority of the patents currently hold?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Addendum to my previous comment:
Ah, the filing date does precede the BlackBerry when used with a touchscreen. So, since the method of selecting the app is the only difference, someone needs to file a patent on a method of switching to an app via spoken word, wireless neural net, holographic interface, etc.
A patent being differentiated by flipping a switch with your finger versus flipping the switch with a stick is not a significant enough difference to warrant a patent. The USPTO needs to be burned to the ground, the ground salted, and the patent reviewers driven underground to live forevermore as the troglodytes they really are*.
*Hyperbole.
I think the prior art clause died a month or two ago. Legislation was signed that turned the whole thing into a "first to file" system. I hope I'm waaaaaaay off base.
What they don't realise though is that shit like this puts people off.
Who does this "put off" other than techno-geeks that read sites like /.? I don't think the average consumer is taking Apple's heavy-handed patent tactics into account when they are picking out their next smartphone. This is a win-win for Apple; they make it cumbersome for their competitors to have basic functionality on their devices and can use said cumbersomeness to argue that their products are more consumer friendly. Meanwhile nobody outside of communities like this one cares about the tactics they are using. Heck, even within this community we've got our share of apologists for Apple/Google/Microsoft/other-boogieman-of-the-day.
In the long term this argues in favor of patent reform. That will be an uphill battle though; most policymakers are woefully ignorant about this issue and even the ones who are well informed don't find it a sexy enough issue to spend political capital on. One can only hope this issue becomes more mainstream as the court system bogs down under the load of nonsense patent litigation.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I want this cold-war style phone war to end in everybody getting sued into oblivion! Maybe the crooks in government will fix the patent system when their kids can't buy a new smart phone anymore.
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It's about time all these stupid patents were dismissed.
Can you imagine what the car would be like if they had all these stupid patents in place. You can't use wheels, can't use steering wheel, can't even as much as use a wind shield, and the stupid list would go on. Maybe a triangular shape that cannot take passengers springs to mind.
The dumb assess should be thrown out, prior art or whatever. Bunch of losers.
And exactly when does Apple receive the moniker: "Lord of all evil"? Can we vote to change Apple's logo on /. to a spinning flaming skull circa interweb 1999? Can someone please tell me what it is that Apple has innovated? Not only did they not make their own OS (last I checked FreeBSD is not a product of Apple inc.) but they steal from the open source community. (Logic:if they don't plan on playing nice they really don't deserve to benefit from the eons of man hours that went into creating the OS they so arrogantly tout as their own. That's just my opinion of course.) So what exactly did Apple innovate, invent or create? All I see here is a more up to date version of the windows mobile phones that came out in the late 90's.
Everything they've "invented" is nothing but mashups of technologies that already exist in software frameworks made by people other than Apple. Even the combinations they've selected existed long before the iPhone was created. Voice controlled AI? Ya, we were already doing that a long time before Apple abandoned their PPC hardware platform for the "not as good as the PPC" Intel platform. They are a decade late to the smart phone race, but they claim to be the most prolific innovators in the market. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the patents involved know without equivocation that Apple's arguments are worse than baseless, they are an insult to anyone who has used this technology for the last 20 years. And now they aim to cripple their competition, not thorough making a better product, but by using the perverted rule of law as a cudgel to prevent fair competition.
Apple really is the new root of all that is evil.
It's called multitasking. Electronic devices have been doing this since the 1960s. There is absolutely nothing special here. I've been making VoIP calls on my computer since the mid 90s. Guess what? I could switch to another program without breaking the call. The fact that this all fits in my pocket now is nothing special. Oh, but this takes input from a touchscreen. I guess that's different and no one else is making those.
Right. Prior art is interpreted narrowly; any minor difference is enough to invalidate it. Claims, on the other hand, are interpreted broadly; any way of shoehorning the proposed infringing device into the scope of the patent claim is accepted. So it's easy to get a patent that covers things done in exactly the same way as the prior art.
They set up the system, and there's one good way to play it, following normal rules of game theory. Apple is better than most companies at understanding that game theory principle, is all.
Actually you could do this on the old Razr moto phones from the feature phone era.
I suspect Apple is hanging their hat on the phrase "portable electronic device with a touch screen display", believing that doing what had been done all along somehow becomes new and patent-able simply because you added a touch screen into the mix.
I think this gets tossed the first time they try to enforce it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Why should they do something. Such patents are the only thing US companies have to fight on international markets. All beside the design of the iPhone comes from South Korea, China, Japan, or Taiwan. The display and the video processor is from Samsung or LG, the A5 is an ARM-based design manufactured by Samsung, the touchscreen is from Balda AG a German company which produces in China (so the manufacturing skill are in Chinese hands), Bluetooth comes from the UK, the Baseband IC comes from Infineon, etc. Apple only provides design and the software. And most of the hardware comes from outside the US. Dominantly from Taiwan, but also from South Korea, Japan, and Germany. If the US would let go of the patent system, they would lose more ground. as they already lost production skills to Taiwan and China, and they lost development skills to Taiwan. The remaining US parts are WiFi-chip, touch-control chip, CMOS and flash IC, which are also available from non-US companies. The US has first to start to be innovative again, before it will be beneficiary to let go of such rigid patent system. Or they have to fool around a little longer, so they are overtaken on all fields by Asia and then drop the patent thing, as the US has to pay.
Google delivers technologies. Apple delivers products.
Patenting the obvious is par for the course in the industry, yes. Proceeding to sue everybody and their mother over it, though, is a bit different. Especially when you seek to block the competitors from using your "unique feature" at all, rather than license it to them at a reasonable cost.
The original iphones couldn't multitask - even though every other crappy windows mobile touchscreen smartphone of the time could.
I remember at the time Apple was criticised for bringing multitasking into iphones so late in the game.
Now they've added multitasking in, years after everyone else, and they're claiming the patent????
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Apple of course have become the masters of patent first, searching existing product features, checking to see if they are patented, if they are not patented, they immediately patent them.
Apple seems destined to become the number mega patent troll as their range of fad products die off. They are getting uglier and uglier as each day passes.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I'm curious: Have any of you committed Apple fans started to see that there is just something fundamentally wrong with Apple's behavior regarding these patents? Is there any point at which you would say, "You know, this crosses a line, and I just can't support this company any more. They've provided me with a lot of pleasure over the years and their products really made me feel good, but this is just too much. I won't give my money to a company that is dedicated to using a shitty law to kill competition. If there had been a company doing what Apple is doing in 1981, there never would have been a Macintosh or an OSX or an iPhone. They're not the only company doing this, but I'm just not going to be a fan of any company that does."?
Or have all you pole-smokers just decided you're going to turn yourselves into human shields and protect Apple's quarterly profits at any price, even at the cost of further innovation in the future by any company not named "Apple"? Will you just rationalize it all with "It's just the way business is done" and dutifully line up days before the iPhone is released, believing that the ends justify the means?
Seriously, I'm wondering if there's any breaking point, or would Apple actually have to start massacring babies and puppies before you'd consider taking Steve Jobs' corpse's rusty trombone out of your mouth long enough to draw a breath?
You are welcome on my lawn.
and symbian.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
First off, we really need to draw a line in the sand here: A modern phone is just a very small, battery powered computer. EVERYTHING that's ever been done on other computers before it was done by Apple on the iPhone should count as prior art unless the courts are completely retarded.. Apple tries to get around this by specifying in the patent a "mobile device", but that's a false distinguisher. Since mobile devices are computers, anything done on a computer should count as prior art.
Therefore:
Windows has been multi-tasking and allowing task switching since the 80's. Unix since the 70's (or late 60's?). Every computer system has had a menu button on the keyboard or a menu icon on screen to allow you to task switch.
Specifying a specific type of app to task switch is completely moronic. Your OS supports task switching or it doesn't. What's next, the "Task switching from a Word Processor app" patent? The "Task switching from a web browser app" patent? Task switching from a game, or calculator, or spreadsheet, or database, or email client?
you couldn't always run apps on iphone. so your further assertion that you could "always run apps while on a call" is completely bogus.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Yes, you do have to be in freakish cult not to see that Apple is abusing the patent system in order to restrain free trade. The patent system does not force Apple to file a new bogus lawsuit every day.
no, they were 'features'. apps are things you can actually install.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.