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| A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-08-26 10:28:31 |
| In light of the jury verdict in Apple vs. Samsung, the one-liners and jokes flew back and forth. One in particular, by Dan Frakes, has been copied and pasted all over the web, and it goes like this: "When the iPhone debuted, it was widely criticized for having no buttons/keys. Now people think the iPhone's design is 'obvious'." This is a very common trend in this entire debate that saddens me to no end: the iPhone is being compared to simple feature phones, while in fact, it should be compared to its true predecessor: the PDA. PDAs have always done with few buttons. |
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| Problem |
| By henryb7318 on 2012-08-26 10:58:21 |
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The problem with your belief is that your own evidence Thom shows PDAs with more than one button. Apple *was* criticised for having no buttons apart from the 'home' button. That is a fact, and it's not because the iPhone was being compared to 'feature' phones, but the not so 'smart' phones of 5 years ago. Your comparison is not with phones. The fact of the matter is, like it or not, iPhone owner or not, is that when the iPhone was released within months companies like Samsung rushed to emulate it. The jury in the US case knows this as they decided it to be so. This is after Samsung lawyers argued otherwise. If these people can see it, why can't you? |
 - Score: 4 |
| Comment by neutralTTY |
| By neutralTTY on 2012-08-26 11:01:45 |
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With these articles with such good references on products like the iPhone but before this, is where one asks how the justice system can work in the United States for Apple to come out winning lawsuits. (Even my girlfriend has a LG Prada and many people has PDAs with Sim cards). And do you remember these PDA with GPS that worked so well and were so utils? What will have been the reason for abandoning that market? I guess the appearance of phones with GPS. For me, current smartphones (iPhone included) are only old PDAs with smaller screen and technologically fasters, |
| - Score: 3 |
| Comment by spiderman |
| By spiderman on 2012-08-26 11:17:51 |
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Multitouch was a trend for some years before the iPhone. CES was all about multitouch devices. The media was painting Microsoft surface as the future of computing. This was the obvious path for everybody. Apple catched the trend with perfect marketing. Nowadays multitouch = Apple in the mind of the unwashed masses. Apple has managed to appropriate the trend and to turn it into big dollars thanks to its media strings. Apple is a very efficient marketing machine and they look like innovators in the eye of their subjects. |
| - Score: 12 |
| Comment by kwan_e |
| By kwan_e on 2012-08-26 11:21:26 |
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Surely, the whole "buttonless" idea was obvious since the invention of the television... People had been finding ways of getting rid of buttons for decades. Voice control, styluses, trackballs, the Etch-a-Sketch. The iP(hone|([ao]d)) still has buttons, but they are now displayed on screen. In much the same way, humanity has progressed from thousands of gods to just a few, then to one and now there's a movement to get rid of the last one. It's ridiculous to assert with a straight face that it wasn't obvious that the mathematical operation of subtraction would lead to buttonless devices. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: Problem |
| By ephracis on 2012-08-26 11:22:01 |
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Obviously the jury foreman was biased (he owned a vague patent himself), ignored jury instructions (he wanted to "punish" Samsung with damages even though the instructions said they couldn't go beyond "compensation"), and heavily influenced the rest of the jury (based on report from another juror). Add to that all inconsistencies in the judgement. So what the jury find or didn't find doesn't matter much to common sense. Clearly, everyone compared the iPhone to the feature phones they already owned and not PDAs. I know I did the same (I've never owned a PDA but did want one). Anyway, if we (try to) put all bias aside and look at the matters in an objective way it's pretty clear that everyone is always inspired by someone. The question is: how much inspiration do we allow for society to thrive? Personally, I think this should be OK because I see it as fashion and Apple is a great trendsetter: http://samsungcopiesapple.tumblr... |
| - Score: 11 |
| RE: Comment by neutralTTY |
| By Ponto on 2012-08-26 11:24:50 |
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I think the greatest achievement of Apple is that people think the iPhone is basically a phone and not basically a PDA. I always to use the term PDA instead of smartphone. The usage pattern of most people I know is that telephony features are only a nice to have add-on. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE: Comment by spiderman |
| By brichpmr on 2012-08-26 11:30:09 |
| Not just marketing....marketing working in conjunction with the creation of an ecosystem that in the eyes of many has not been equaled, and then execution of a brilliant strategy. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Problem |
| By Carewolf on 2012-08-26 11:51:37 |
| But most of the Samsung devices found to infringe in the recent case looked much more like the Palm in the picture than an iPhone. With a central button and two extra buttons on each side. Only one of the devices hid the side-buttons when it was turned off, but it still had more than one. |
| - Score: 6 |
| How easy it is to forget... |
| By bowkota on 2012-08-26 12:04:30 |
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When the iPhone came out it was heavily criticised for not having a hardware keyboard (was often to compared to the then successful Blackberries); the author of this article was on of them. PDAs were nice but they never caught on cause they weren't good enough. However I was one of those people who insisted the obvious thing. Phones should be converging towards PDAs. I even owned owned a Sony Ericsson P800. Apple was the first company to design, market and sell the first real successful smartphone. They changed the market in a good way and should be credited for this. Having good ideas in your lab is no good unless you manage to get it to the people |
| - Score: -1 |
| No regular person owned a PDA |
| By harmhilvers on 2012-08-26 12:04:53 |
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PDAs might have existed for quite some time before the iPhone, but in my experience there were not that many people who owned one. There were, however, large numbers of people who owned dumbphones, remotes, televisions, computers and all kinds of other devices with lots of buttons. Yes, you might be right in stating that the almost-button-less iPhone should be compared to the almost-button-less PDAs of the time, but for many people back then that was not the comparison that was made. |
| - Score: 1 |
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