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Typo Keyboard For iPhone Faces Sales Ban
time_lords_almanac (3527081) writes "BlackBerry is trying to put the kibosh on the Typo, a physical keyboard attachment for iPhone. And they've won the first round, in the form of a sales ban on the attachment. From the article: '"BlackBerry is pleased that its motion for a preliminary injunction against Typo Products LLC was granted. This ruling will help prevent further injury to BlackBerry from Typo's blatant theft of our patented keyboard technology," a spokeswoman for BlackBerry told the news agency in an email.'"
Because, you know, physical keyboards are such an advancing field.... I can't imagine how awful keyboards would be with out BlackBerry's patented technology.
BlackBerry failed to keep up with the rest of the world... I wish they would just die with a little grace and accept that they world will be better off without them bitching and whining as they slowing fade into a painful memory.
Change the beveled key shape to something not covered under a patent and call it a day.
They're over-valued and create significant litigation. The only people who benefit are the lawyers.
Further proof that patents harm customers far more than they promote innovation.
Fuck autorefresh!!
I fully expect a 3D printed keyboard fully open sourced by tomorrow afternoon at the latest!
At the twilight of our civilization, endless patent and copyright fights over obvious things. A keyboard at the bottom rather than the side of a phone? Obviously this is a precious work of genius that must be protected at all costs. Soon someone will make a new generation of 8K HDTV's and they will patent "the use of a remote control with 8K HDTV's" When will someone see through this horseshit and revoke these stupid patents.
You mean it's possible for someone to destroy Blackberry faster than Blackberry has done itself?
Figure out a way to turn this into an anti-Apple rant, pronto!
#DeleteChrome
So I guess who ever buys the patents from them will continue the lawsuits?
Nobody decides to buy a BB solely based upon a hardware keyboard.
Probably could have stopped w/"nobody decides to buy a BB"
They have gone further than just putting a keyboard on the iphone, see pic:
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...
They've copied the shape of the keys, the horizontal bars between the keys etc.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Why would they name a keyboard "typo"? Even as an amusing meta-reference, it falls flat.
It's like trying to sell a toilet paper named "Anal Scraper".
This is how it ends for Blackberry? They have to fall back to patent abuse for funding? How sad.
A fucking BEVEL? Seriously?
Iconic design? Hardly. Oh, well done, you put a little curve in a button, you genius you! Who'da thought of that one? EVERYONE? Oh yeah.
There are good patents, bad patents, and downright abusive patents, this falls in to the latter.
Honestly, I think I'd actually gladly accept 0.5% of taxes going towards paying a group of people to go through every single patent and reject blatant abuse like this.
It stinks of Apples crap when they sued Samsung over using AN ACTUAL SHAPE for a phone. Then they later tried to place it all on the buttons position and so much bullshit spawned from there.
It is stunts like this that ensure when Blackberry finally must close their doors, few will weep. Roughly one year remains.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
...but we all lose. These bans do not in any way help consumers and should be laughed out of court. One thing to not steal tech from the people who invent it, but this is about ideas. Like banning people from making wheels because some comp owns the round shape patent
Funny. There's a shit-ton of Chinese messaging phones using Blackberry style keyboards with shaped keys (oooh so innovative). I doubt they're licensing the patent given the low price point these sell at in emerging markets.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Asserting a patent that turns out to be invalid or not applicable should cost the accuser big time. All of the defendants legal costs plus 5% of annual worldwide gross revenue would be a good start.
this isn't about patents or saving blackberry, it's about stopping ryan seacrest. he's the one behind the kardasshians for heaven's sake. set aside your petty libertarian and socialist differences and unite against tyranny of another more diabolical sort!
Oh, it's Blackberry going down the vortex and attempting to suck anything else they can with it... Bye, bye lazy idiots
Gotta side with BlackBerry on this one.
...have been around for years.
Keyboards like this one...
http://0.tqn.com/d/ipod/1/0/w/...
However, one look at the "Typo" tells you that it's a blatant BB ripoff. If you want / need a keyboard like that, buy a 'Berry.
This is being blown way out of proportion here. Filing the infringement lawsuit and winning the injunction was the first step towards making a deal. With the injunction in hand Blackberry has demonstrated to Seacrest and his investors that this is serious, but they've also left open the way to a deal. This would probably take the form of royalty payments from Typo to Blackberry for each case sold, the amount to be negotiated after agreement in principle to pay royalties. The remaining Blackberry shareholders are hard core professional investors and financial types now, not technologists, so they will be eager to squeeze any money they can out of the patent portfolio even if that cannibalizes a few Blackberry sales down the road.
...fantastic. Can't wait to start my own ICan'tBelieveIt'sNotTexturedVegetableProtein franchise, featuring the SoyBurglar and Donald McTrump.
Better than anything BlackBerry ever produced. I miss having a proper five-row hardware keyboard on my phone.
Have you somehow forgotten the lawsuits Apple has filed over patents? You know, that have been in the news for the past half decade it seems? Good on Blackberry to play the game then. Patents are after all just tools used to sue infringers.
Guess they don't know the definition of the work "theft".
Oh Nos!
This will surely help blackberry survive in the market!
Good job with those patents! Now nobody can have a working keyboard, not their
nonexistent client nor the iPhone people who could have used a Typo.
E
What's the saying? If you cant innovate, litigate?
I think BB is just sad that they didn't do it first. They could have made a fortune by Bundling a similar keyboard and the BB Messenger.
"Get your BB upgrade kit today!"
Try to think of a discription you'd made for this kwyboard, and see if the sentence 'like the blackberry one' does'nt appear in the description,
They likely aren't hypocrites and most likely just lazy. My bet it that the authors of the original comments didn't even go to the article and take a look at the keyboard that is a blatant knock-off of a Blackberry keyboard.
Why? Because I'm stockpiling in the event that TYPO goes belly-up. Using a Typo-keyboard with my iPhone is the finest mobile phone experience available and I am loathe to go back to a glass keyboard. I had a death grip on my Blackberry but I switched to iPhone a few years ago for reasons too numerous to list. I tried a few keyboard cases for iPhone. Although not perfect, the Typo is by far the best of the lot. Using it allows me to have the whole iPhone screen visible. I can thumb type quickly and accurately and avoid iPhone autocorrect hell. I live in the most densely populated area of New York City, where everyone is in a hurry and good percentage of them are morons. People have asked about my phone with the keyboard but no one has ever confused it with a Blackberry. As previously posted, Blackberry could have come out with a similar keyboard bundled with BBM for iPhone and the most popular android devices years ago. Had they done so, they might just be making money now. This is a fine example of a moribund company reaching up from the grave to drag a really great product down with it.
I _was_ going to say, "I can't imagine blocking such a product would increase RIM's market share. All this does is make people hate Blackberries even more."
But then I saw what it looks like. It's a freaking Blackberry keyboard rip off! At least take the time to design something a LITTLE new, guys.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
...and the numbers-- which have generally gone across the top on other phones-- are laid out the same way.
just a reminder: cell phones with physical digit keys in a 3x4 grid far outweighs those with digit keys in a 1x10 array.
In fact, the 3x4 (specifically with the 123 line on top) was invented at bell labs and in use before 1970. Using a decades-old digit layout on a keyboard with more than 12 keys wasn't exactly rocket science.