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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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