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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.
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.
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?
I wish they would just die with a little grace and accept that they world will be better off without them
Ya, like SCO did - oh, wait... :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nobody decides to buy a BB solely based upon a hardware keyboard.
Probably could have stopped w/"nobody decides to buy a BB"
I understand why they have it, but it annoys me also.. reloading while I'm reading an article isn't helpful.
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".
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.
Android and iOS give the buying public what they want. Apple is continuing its personal computer paradigm of having an OS that goes with their somewhat more upscale hardware and Android has essentially pulled a Windows and been the "clone" OS to use. Both offer fairly sophisticated suites of interconnected applications that also tie-in well to computers.
I honestly couldn't tell you what Blackberry does. And that's their biggest problem.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
...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.
After playing the role of plaintiff in multiple patent lawsuits concerning relatively miniscule design innovations, the double-edged sword that is the US patent system is now seemingly also willing to slice the apple.
Perhaps the only hope for reform of the patent system relies on it becoming inconvenient even for it's former proponents?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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!
Blackberry sells the only device "owned" by the corporation. Secure end to end encryption, owned by the owner, not a cloud provider. It's a walled garden where the owner of the device owns the walls and the garden. It's security-focused enterprise/government that keeps it going. If you aren't one of them, there's no reason to consider it. I know a few home users that have them. The last one had to use an android phone for 2 weeks. He never turned his Blackberry on again.
Learn to love Alaska
The GPU in the Galaxy S4 consistently beats the Ax processors in the graphics department, so no.
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.
See, every now and then it does pay to get out of bed in the morning!
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Its hilarious to hear this in a world where SSL is a beseiged technology, and RIM offered the only solution with per-device keys. Clearly we'll all be better off without the only mass-produced product that is neigh on unhackable.
I have of course moved on to android because RIM hasnt kept up-- but the world would be better off if they had because they had some incredibly good offerings and to this day have the only workable physical keyboard. With as much as I love swiftkey, Im still not convinced it holds a candle to a good Blackberry.
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
Might I suggest setting your browser to ignore it?
Personally I have my browser set to ignore nearly everything a web server hands it these days. Refreshes, ecmascript, plugins - all the crap that makes the web suck.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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,
I couldn't agree more. If Blackberry had come out with their own keyboard and bundled it with BBM five years ago, they'd be making money today.
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!
perhaps I'm missing something, but Apple didn't make or sell this keyboard add-on
Overlaying the qwerty keyboard-- specifically the "qwe-asd-zxc-0" keys-- with 0-9 is something that is pretty specifically Blackberry. Every other phone with qwerty I've seen has overlaid it over qwertyuiop. On-screen keyboards have generally had it as an alternate keyset, or overlaid it over the qwerty.... keys.
Its not even just that, its that when you put the two side by side you cant really tell which is which. Everything about the styling and design is exactly like Blackberry, and generally one of the thresholds for cases like this is whether it is likely to confuse a customer as to the maker of a product.
I had noscript but I find setting permissions on it more annoying than what it's stopping.
This is not an Apple product. It is a very good accessory for an iPhone made by a small, start-up third party. Blackberry does not offer one nor do they intend to make anything remotely like it in the near future. They just don't want anyone else to do so. The keyboard may, at first glance, look the same. It is not. A Typo keyboard is smaller, has more keys and functions as a case for an iPhone.