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.
I was a heavy PDA user back in the day, and have become somewhat of a collector of these devices over the past few years. I never partook in the PalmOS vs. PocketPC debates, since I saw merit in both, and as such, used them both heavily. PocketPC devices were more versatile and powerful than PalmOS devices, but this came at the price of a more complicated UI and the occasional stability issues (though those were not as bad as some make it out to be today).
With the phone aspect of smartphones being such a small part of how we use smartphones today, you’d think people were smart enough to see that the lineage of the iPhone – and Android and Windows Phone – does not come from buttoned-up feature phones, but from the minimalistic, buttoned-down PDAs of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Here’s a photo of a few random devices I grabbed from my collection, spanning the full spectrum of just that period (an LG Prada has been thrown in for completeness’ sake, showing that even if you look at feature phones, Frakes’ comment has little basis in fact). I didn’t even have to look – I just grabbed a few random devices.
Consider this: since the jury ruled that the Epic 4G – a device with a keyboard – infringed Apple’s iPhone design patents, all of the above could infringe as well. And they are 2-7 years older than the iPhone.
It surprises me that a well-respected and good technology writer and enthusiast like Dan Frakes is also part of the “let’s-forget-all-about-the-PDA”-crowd. Random commenters and people on the street, sure – but knowledgeable technology enthusiasts? As a PDA enthusiast, I expect better.
I’ve complained about this before, but where does this sudden disregard for history come from? Why are PDAs suddenly that weird uncle you never talk about and only see at birthdays? During the heydays of the PDA, every nerd and geek I knew seemed to have one or more of these things, since they were incredibly powerful and versatile for their time, and it wasn’t until Android grew up that modern smartphones (modern as in, iOS, Android, WP) managed to match the PDA’s versatility.
This was a very common scenario for me on my beloved iPaq: I’d be watching a Futurama episode on my iPaq, streamed over my network from my PC, when an email arrived. I could pause the video, switch to my email client, read the email, and go to the link mentioned therein. After checking out the link in the browser, I could write and send a reply, and go back to watching the video where I left off. This was back when Google was still a search engine, and Apple was still busy not dying.
As a geek, I do not want history to be revised to make it seem as if mobile computing started with the iPhone and Android – I want credit to go where it’s due: Palm. The Zoomer was the first fully touch-screen operated graphical PDA, in 1992 (before the Newton, even), and PalmOS is the common ancestor to all that came after it: PocketPC, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and everything else.
The iPhone did not introduce the concept of a mobile device with a fully touch-screen operated user interface and few buttons. This was a concept ingrained in the mobile industry since the late ’80s and early ’90s, and acclaimed and/or popular technology enthusiasts like Dan Frakes, John Gruber, Marco Arment, and the countless others who retweeted this nonsense are doing the industry a huge disservice by ignoring this obvious fact.
Just to drive the point home: a device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious – at least to the millions and millions of happy PDA users.
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?
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.com/
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.
But most devices the jury found to infringe have more than one hardware button.
And? The devices don’t have to have only one button to be found infringing.
The problem is: people are sometimes making arguments based on their own logic, sometimes making argument based on what they think is the law, sometimes making arguments that are actually consistent with the law, and often mixing and matching and getting confused.
Thom thinks the iPhone was “obvious”. I’m unsure if he thinks this personally or if he thinks legally in a court of the US as well. I disagree both personally and legally.
What I do know is: Samsung had an opportunity to prove it was obvious and failed to do so. They are represented (and so are almost all Android licensees and Google) by Quinn Emmanual, the Mighty Quinn. And they failed hard.
OP said that non-obvious part is specifically having one simple button. My point is that Apple complained about many devices with multiple buttons, so this is clearly not their view.
Infringing what exactly? You are aware that there were many separate claims, are you?
And your argument was the jury found devices with more than one button infringing.
But you can’t use some forum poster’s personal logic for non-obviousness as an argument against why devices can be found infringing.
Invalidity of patent because of obviousness and/or your personal opinion of what is obvious is not determined in the same manner that a court determines if someone is infringing a valid patent.
Since the utility patents cover software, and the design patents of the iPhone form relate to hardware — which patent do YOU think I’m talking about?
Edited 2012-08-26 19:39 UTC
Is your entire argument really based on the fact that Thom doesn’t own an Apple Newton to put in his photo? Oh wait, the Newton had zero buttons, not one, so I guess it doesn’t count either.
Still, gotta imagine the day that some poor Apple engineer was hysterically hunting for the lost stylus to his beloved Newton, right when Steve storms into the room! Quickly, slap a phone card in the side of it as disguise: “This is, uh… my new mobile phone concept (and not the result of my dirty sweet love affair with John Sculley at all)!” Genius!
..
As for the ‘Apple did it first then everyone else rushed similar products to market’ argument, that’s utterly irrelevant. The question was: ‘Was the idea obvious enough not to justify a patent?’, not ‘Who was going to be first in proving the market was ready for such a product?’ Hell, when I was a nipper I used to test uncertain waters by simple expedient of making my younger siblings jump in first; anything that didn’t kill them I assumed was safe for me to try as well. Pretty sure I didn’t infringe any patents either.
Patents are supposed to protect truly novel ideas, not every modest remix that comes along. (Protecting a specific implementation of an idea is what copyright’s for; don’t confuse the two.)
..
Man, now I wish Doug Engelbart had patented the crap out of his original mouse. Imagine Apple legal’s face when slammed with a lawsuit for ripping off a genuine inventor’s genuinely novel and original idea. Lord knows what Mac users would use as pointers now, straws maybe. /sarc
(BTW, full disclosure: A few years ago Apple merrily filed a patent on their own half-assed implementation of a bunch of concepts that they, myself and other Mac folks had all been happily putting into practice in closed- and open-source Mac libraries and languages for the previous 15 years. And guess what they wrote in the ‘prior art’ section? That’s right: ‘none at all’. Which, in addition to making it hard to make an honest claim of “we’re only doing it as defence against trolly trolls”, is also against patent law; but who’s going to notice one more patent abuse, right? So when it comes to all these software patent pissing matches, I’ve precious few sympathies at all, because 99%+ are just sleazy business tactics.)
The fun part: I actually HAVE a Newton. It uses a UI paradigm (notebook paradigm) which was short-lived and died out quickly in favour of Palm’s application-centric UI, which iOS, Android, and everybody else in the mobile space copied 1:1.
BTW Newton and pointing out ~contemporary early PDAs, like the Tandy Zoomer – I stumbled recently on another that might be also worth mentioning. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad#1990s
Now, it was apparently a quite horrible device (links in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPad particularly the video review) …but then, all of those very early models were more or less horrible (starting with the basic idea of handwriting recognition – WE can hardly read even our OWN handwriting, NVM from other people)
PS. WRT to one bit of your article…
And I’m not entirely convinced it’s a good thing…
(interruptions, stealing focus, and so on; still, I can’t help also doing the same thing)
Edited 2012-08-30 01:11 UTC
So how many of them have you… expanded, that way?
(and/or what incentives did you use for speedy replacements)
Erm… have you never counted the number of buttons on an iphone, there is more than one…
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,
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.
This post made me smile because I always ask people when they show me how smart their smartphone is “but can you make a phonecall with it ?”
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.
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.
Riiight, that must be why, in the first year, Apple denied the need for iPhone native apps… announcing and subsequently enabling that only when pushed, when confronted with the reality of people doing it themselves anyway.
“Brilliant strategy” revisionist history BS… (sure, I know it’s standard with Apple fans, but you could at least not do it with so recent events, wait at least a decade or so) The vigorous iOS ecosystem was largely an accident, certainly not planned by Apple beforehand.
Exactly correct, basically Apple has not invented anything and its only hard work is keeping the wheels of the propaganda machine greased.
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.
Apple should patent “Less is more”!
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
Excuse me? I was? I’d love some evidence for that.
Edit: Just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy – here’s my item on the announcement of the iPhone. Not a single negative remark about the lack of buttons.
http://www.osnews.com/story/16902/Apple-Announces-Apple-TV-iPhone-N…
Edited 2012-08-26 12:17 UTC
One of your comments from your link.
If I’m not mistaken you made similar comments on the lack of a physical keyboard in the months after its release. I could be wrong though, there were so many people with the same issue.
And when they finally realised that physical keyboards were a nuisance they came up with the lack of SDK and then the lack of copy paste etc etc.
I still detest not having feedback. However, that is not at all what you claimed I said.
I see you have nothing to back up your claims. Good to know.
You can have tactile feedback without buttons with vibration. All modern Android devices do this, and the idea predates iPhone too.
A small initial point: I love the reduction of the role and significance of the Newton in your timeline to just a throw away reference in parenthesis. At least you are consistent.
I could argue the toss about this forever with you Thom, and with other motley bunch of techies, Apple haters and Android fans who want to minimise the role of Apple’s innovation in the history of personal computing and to insist that the iPhone was just another incremental step in an evolution wrought mostly by others.
But why bother? You are not going to change you mind and frankly neither am I.
What is worth discussing is the significance of the Samsung-Apple verdict and what it means for the future. It seems fairly clear that given the opportunity to put to a jury its more or less full portfolio of evidence and testimony that Apple will stand a good chance of winning more such trials in the future.
So where does this leave Android, Google and the Android OEM community? If as seems likely this case marks a watershed after which Android OEMs will feel more vulnerable to legal attacks from Apple and have to restrict their product development to take on board the judgements handed down in this case, what should Google do? Should it counter attack with Motorola patents and escalate the legal war? Should it accept the partial but strategic victory that Apple has won and try to route around it?
What advice would you give Google about how they should exercise leadership in the Android ecosystem?
It seems clear to me that up until now Android has been a fire and forget weapon for Google, make it, releases it and just let things fall as they will. Google has positively tried to avoid exercising the same sort of hegemonic that Microsoft did in the old Windows ecosystem. Should Google take a more active role in managing the Android OEM community? Can it do that given that within that community so much power has accrued to Samsung?
I am posing such questions in a genuine way. The endless repeating of ‘it’s not fair’ in ever more complex and well researched ways takes the debate no where. It happened, Apple won a big one, what happens next for Android and Google? I want to hear what a considered piece of advice would be from those that love Google and Android, those who want it to succeed.
I don’t think I’me really and Android *fan* (I don’t really give a shit about a huge corporation losing some billion dollars, be it Apple, Google or Samsung), but I’m an open source software supporter, so I prefer Android over iOS.
Now, given the state of the software and design patent laws in the US, I don’t find the outcome so surprising or outrageous. This is because it seems there was some evidence (notably Google telling Samsung not to copy Apple) that Samsung was actually trying to copy the iPhone with their Galaxy line. Even the homescreens look the same, it’s really f–king stupid. I mean Android vanilla homescreen is pretty different from iPhone’s.
Now, most other Android phones I’ve seen are pretty different from iPhones. For example, I don’t see Apple winning a case against Google’s Nexus brand or against HTC (I’ve got an Evo 3D). The hardware isn’t similar and neither is the software. Plus, Apple also copied some stuff from Android (notifications come to mind).
So in the end, the least innovative phone line in the Android ecosystem got punished.
That being said, I still think the whole patent system is broken, but that’s another discussion.
Edited 2012-08-26 15:42 UTC
This was not a legal advice, though.
No, they don’t. When Apple shows Android phones they always show the app drawer instead of the home screen, because it looks a lot more like iPhone’s home screen.
Then you’re missing the fact that Nexus S was found infringing.
So what? It didn’t have to be the opinion of a lawyer, judge, or jury to be admissible as evidence that Samsung was aware they could be using Apple IP and should avoid doing so. You are trying to make arguments you hope are valid and apply them to the US legal system. Are you claiming there is no such thing as admissible evidence that doesn’t originate as “legal advice”? That does sound silly, doesn’t it?
Apple shows what Samsung shows in 80% of the advertising, product packaging, and other marketing materials. The app drawer designed to look like Apple’s homescreen.
Fixed that for you.
Yeah, put the TouchWiz app drawer in front of anyone and see if they say if they think it is designed to look like the Apple iOS home screen or a PalmOS or PocketPC app drawer.
This “correction” doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Well yes maybe that’s because we are ten years further in development of high-res screens and other technologies.
Your dismissal of history is worrying, but not unsurprising considering you allegiance.
No, it is not because of higher ppis or other technologies. It’s because Samsung thought they could sell more phones if theirs looked more like iPhones.
Technological advancement doesn’t morph copying the PalmOS or PocketPC OS into a visual clone of the iOS homescreen without the intention of copying.
This is further absurdity, and you throw in some ad hominem at the end to boot!
http://www.flixya.com/files-photo/w/i/j/wijayamarthen-2167469.jpg
Oh noes! Nokia has pre-infringed Apple’s revolutionary 4-item wide application icon grid arrangement (“on a mobile device”) on the home screen. Quick, call in the patent drones, there’s money to be made!
Seriously though, an app drawer that is represented as a grid of icons is probably *the* most obvious way to do it. It’s been the norm in computing since the dawn of GUIs.
Btw: Symbian also had a customizable quick launch bar that is functionally a superset of the dock on the iPhone.
Right, this is admissible as an evidence that there was a possibility of a violation. This is not the smoking gun as many make it to be.
You’re putting words in my mouth and hope no one will notice.
Some proof, please.
Citation needed.
I love the way you don’t actually try to offer any counter-argument & just throw out some substance-free snark instead. At least you’re consistent.
Not that it would take much effort, since you basically just copy-paste the same talking points over & over again.
Still borrowing rhetoric from Twilight & Justin Bieber’s tween fangirls, I see.
There, fixed that for you.
….remind me again, how many times now have you re-posted almost the exact same “but… but… Google is advertising company!!!!!” spiel? You can guesstimate if you like, probably easiest to round to the nearest thousand.
I was trying to point people such as yourself away from the sterile war of rhetoric with Apple fans, a debate that’s probably going nowhere, towards a more pressing debate and one which is of some consequence. What happens now? Apple won big, it may be overturned on appeal but probably not, and Apple will continue to move forward with more aggressive legal actions, and will probably win more cases. I repeat what happens now? If you support Google and Android then what strategy is best from now on? To escalate the IP wars? To change course and concentrate on product differentiation and try to out design Apple? I am genuinely interested in that debate and in hearing what people such as yourself think about such questions.
BTW – Google is an advertising company. If you think different perhaps could you point me at some of the non-advertising products that Google sells and what proportion of the company’s revenues they generate. The latest figures I have seen say Google gets 95% of it’s revenue from ads.
For some strange reason, I’m suddenly reminded of an old quote about “removing the mote from thine own eye.”
Thank you for demonstrating my point, which is that you keep repeating the “OMG advertising company” spiel as if you think you’re revealing some scandalous secret – when, in fact, you’re just stating the blindingly-obvious over and over again. And even though you never actually come right out and say “Google is evil because they’re advertising company”, you’re clearly trying to imply that by constantly repeating a term that carries negative connotations for most people (also known as the fallacy of “guilt by association”).
Nicely done, you just accused Thom of being… a hardware keyboard. Literacy FTW!
Riiiiiight, if you ignore the tens of millions of PDAs that were sold before the iPhone was even conceived of.
In reality, PDAs did catch on – just not with the tap-and-drool morons that jumped onto the iBandwagon.
Uh, bullshit. The Treo line was a success for longer than the entire time the iPhone has even existed (to pick one example). Typical iFanboy historical revisionism.
Except that all of the changes that can be legitimately credited to Apple are changes for the worse. Curated computing, arbitrary & draconian app store restrictions, OSes and UIs that are crippled & locked down to the point where they lack functionality that was standard pre-iPhone, and an overall giant leap backwards in the sophistication of OSes and software.
At best, Apple deserves credit for sparking a race to the bottom & being at the forefront of finding new ways to cripple & dumb-down computers.
Edited 2012-08-26 16:40 UTC
That was because before iPhone the primary purpose of a smartphone was writing emails. Even today, after 5 years of evolution of touch screen keyboards, hardware keyboard still beats on screen one for writing. You can recall a lot of criticism of iPhone email client too, which was sub-par compared to other smartphones.
However once you start targeting smartphone at people reading web, facebook and playing games, you can do away with hardware keyboard. As Thom shows, there were plenty of touch screen-only devices, so this was not a novel idea. The novel idea was to sell such a device as a phone on a mass market.
However having a published good idea in the lab that never makes it to the masses is still prior art.
I’m someone else that has had PDAs since the 90s My favorite was probably the Sony Clie that I think debuted in 2002. I had been planning on buying myself one when they came out, instead the weekend of their release my wife got it. I got stuck with the Palm III.
Still, with the display twisted out you had almost nothing but screen, and I don’t recall any buttons to speak of. Found a good pic:
http://www.pspilot.de/pppnx70/nx70_03h.jpg
So even among PDAs, an almost “buttonless” design was “obvious” and was the direction things were going.
This is 2002!
My first “smart phone” was the Samsung SGH i700 http://www.cellaz.com/photos/285_m.jpg
The Windows OS and browser were woefully lacking, I returned it due to the problems. Not the hardware, the OS.
However the i730 was a different story. The OS and browser worked well. I really enjoyed it. I miss the slide up to reveal a keyboard form factor (without having to rotate to landscape mode).
http://asset0.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/sc/31313312-2-300-0.gif
Even without the iPhone it is entirely plausible that 3 to 5 buttons on the front were the direction things were going. Even “soft buttons” that don’t seem really like buttons.
I think Samsung did copy elements from Apple. Just like Apple has copied elements from others. I own and have owned several Apple and Samsung products. I have both iPad and Galaxy Tab (7) tablets, and use the iPad the most. My primary systems are Mac. My primary phones tend to be Android or WP7.
With that said, I’ll say Samsung probably should end up on the losing end of some of the complaints brought against them by Apple. However, I don’t think this trial fairly arrives at what that should be. There are too many things in this trial that I think weren’t handled fairly or equitably, not the least of which is the jury getting through as quickly as they did. I think there were too many times Samsung wasn’t allowed to bring in suitable prior art. That alone means the jury was not provided the information necessary to come up with a just/fair ruling. They ruled there was no prior art for some things because Samsung was not allowed to bring in the full prior art they found.*
* If Samsung failed to find it in time then that’s an honest error and they should have been allowed to correct it; if they were going for a Perry Mason moment, then that wouldn’t have been fair to Apple. I don’t know what happened, but surely there was another way to resolve this than outright excluding it. Sanction the attorney, but don’t punish the client (Samsung).
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.
Yes, all PDAs at the time were targeted to power users. Apple were the first to market a PDA-like device to regular folks (who had little idea about existing devices). The was a brilliant idea, but to a technological invention.
Fair comment but the reviews of the woefully underpowered/featured-poor iphone were by and large written by people that had only ever used “dumb” phones.
Anecdotally, I recall sitting in pubs with windows mobile units and being asked why I would want an internet capable touch screen phone, as late as 2008. I mention 2008 because I didn’t meet anyone that had the first iphone. Ironically for the next couple of years I had to endure the same muppets going “look what I can do with my iPhone, it is amazing” and then giving me puzzled looks when I tell them that I have been able to do the same thing for years, and indeed that I could do much more.
Kudos to apple for taking someone else’s hard work and making it popular, lack of kudos for then patenting that hard work and using it as a stick to beat the competition.
I propose a new form of space-travel based on the principle of Bistromathics* called court-roomathics; because clearly what happens in court bears absolutely no relation to reality, and therefore as an environment that stands outside of reality, is the perfect place for calculating the math needed to travel vast reaches of space-time.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_G…
“iPhone” is a misnomer. It’s an “iPDA”. Apple cleverly marketed their new PDA as a phone so that the masses would buy it.
Wow now you guys are reaching to call out the jury! Lol. PDA. The Newton could be compared to a PDA, I don’t know any PDA that you were making calls on.
A PDA is not a phone, and remember the original iPhone was not much more then a phone when it came out. Being that it lacked a bunch of features.
Huh? Have you never heard of smartphones based on Windows Mobile, Palm OS or Symbian/UIQ????
Yes and as you said they are smartphones not PDA’s if you want to compare to old smartphones that is fine.
educate yourselfe…
http://ixbtlabs.com/news.html?03/21/14
Aren’t all smartphones basically PDAs with a SIM card?
I guess all cars are a model T?
If Samsung released a Galaxy Note without a SIM slot, what would be the difference between that and a PDA?
The fact that you can install like 100,000 other apps that can do way more then a PDA can. Like my car can do 10,000 more things then a model T.
as good as all PDAs supportet aditionall software
nothing new here
You can do 10,000 more things but your car and the T are still both cars.
I don’t see how the amount of things you can do with a device defines what’s a PDA and what’s not. Maybe it does, but I just don’t see why.
My point is that the Model T and my Honda are both cars but no one would compare the two and say they are the same other then being both cars.
A PDA and the iPhone both have some of the same features but they would not be compared by normal people.
If you cracked out a iPaq and an iPhone and put them next to each other most people would laugh at the comparison.
I understand your point and I know we are arguing semantics here.
I’m not saying that devices marketed as PDAs have the same features as devices marketed as smartphones, it’s just that the way I see it smartphones still fall under the exact definition of a PDA.
Wasn’t it because they have a SIM card I’d bet we would still be calling them PDAs.
I would agree but no one calls the iPod touch a PDA. Samsung makes the same device and it’s not called a PDA ether.
Windows Mobile was Pocket PC with cellular capabilities bolted on.
The apps on windows mobile were generally stand alone apps rather than convoluted internet shortcuts (as is the case with most apps today), hardly surprising given that cellular speeds were so slow in those days.
You are however correct about the first iphone, it lacked any significant apps and did not allow 3rd party apps, again not surprising given that Jobs decreed that owning one should fulfil all of one’s requirements and that it didn’t even have 3G.
The day the iphone was announced I was using finger navigation on my 5″ screen, windows mobile HTC Athena, double tapping to zoom into pages on opera, trying to work out why anyone would want an iphone.
I have no problem with people owning any mobile OS but I hate the fact that apple have been allowed to rewrite history to the point that so many people honestly believe that apple actually invented something new.
Let’s not forget that apple have some of the most mis-leading marketing in the history of the tech industry. It’s hardly surprising that they won a case involving uninformed (manipulated) members of the public yet tend to fair much worse when professionals weigh up the “evidence”.
I guess you don’t grasp the difference between a class of device and a specific model within that class? The actual equivalent to your argument would be claiming that a Camry isn’t an automobile, because it’s not exactly the same as a Model T.
Hell, do you even know what “PDA” stands for? Even in the literal sense of the term, smartphones are clearly qualify as PDAs.
Thank you. Exactly. Just in this case WHO would compare a camery to a motel T?? No one. Yes literally they are both cars, but no one would look at the two and compare them.
Same with a PDA and the iPhone. Which is why the iPhone and Android phones are very popular and most PDA’s were not.
Aside from people who know what an automobile is?
Bullshit, of course you can compare them. You should probably avoid ever studying phylogeny, it would likely cause your brain to explode, leaving your last words as “Nooooooo, wolves can’t be canids because foxes are canids and they’re not the same thing, nooooo!”
So you’re saying that smartphones are not “personal digital assistants” & a PDA magically stops being a PDA when you add a cellular antenna, SIM card slot, and a dialer application. And when people have pointed why that’s idiotic, your response is little more than “la la la, I’m not listening.”
You must be kidding! In reality the only people who know or even care about what a PDA is, are you old ass people on here who are whining about Apple.
The rest of the world could give two shits.
It must be awesome to unaware of even the recent history of today’s technology, I bet everything seems like some new and amazing innovation to you. Hey, check this cool new thing called “IRC” – it’s like Twitter… but in real-time!!!
See first off who says I don’t know. Knowing and caring are two different things. On top of that I am not talking about me. I am talking about the average user. The normal person who of you say IRC to them they will look at you confused. The average person who has only known Apple and Microsoft for most of their life. Not tech people.
You don’t act like you know so it appears to be the same thing. And while you and your generation apparently don’t care, my generation does. Cut that bull about the ‘average’ user. Yeah, perhaps in your generation this is now true. An entire swash of people who grew up taking it all for granted and not knowing a damned thing about computing technology unless you were a techie.
Well, newsflash son, my generation grew up with all of this from the earliest home computers to the PDA to the smartphone to the iPhone. We have watched companies come and go. We know what IRC is. What know what BBS’s were. We aren’t all techies either. But we know how to use our computers, and many of us know how to program them. Or at the very least we know what it means to program them. When we went to school, we got classes in programming not using applications alone. The average user of my generation is around computing everyday, and we do care about the current trend of forgetting or rewriting our most recent past. We are doctors, psychologists, economists, professors, historians, etc. Technology helps us do our jobs more efficiently and more smoothly. I like knowing how to write my own statistical analysis programs in R, and I know many other non IT men and women in my professional sphere that feel the same way.
The worse irony is that the two company’s in the US that are now the dominant market leaders started with the idea of giving the hardware and software to the masses. Microsoft and Apple wanted the general populace to have the freedom that was not available when academia and government alone controlled the tech. And yet now, they and your generation in its ignorance and desire for ‘invisibility to be the goal’ of computing, want to return us to that world once more. This is a world where gatekeepers and a techno-priesthood control the hardware, the OS, the applications, and your data in a nice little walled-garden.
Perhaps it takes someone like me not inside the tech field proper to see this more clearly than some of you who actually believe you are or will become that priesthood. Having been a part of the Apple developer program for years just for my work and personal interest, I eventually left because of how draconian they have become with their walled-garden of protection for the masses they now want to control. No thank you.
Newsflash, I am 42 so I am in the generation who grew up on Tandy computers, TI computers,Caldera Linux and Corel Linux. Who saw MS kill companies like Banyan and Novel, Corel, Lotus, Quatro Pro etc, etc, etc.
But unlike you I know that crying over the past wont change the future, so I deal with the here and now.
And the here and now is Apple and Microsoft and why are they the here in now? Because even though they didn’t invent most of the stuff they now control, they took those ideas and made them profitable and popular! Thats how business works.
Its the reason that companies like Banyan and Novel who had way better products then Microsoft are dead. Great engineers but horrible business skills. Thats not Apple or Microsofts fault, it just boils down to the fact that no mater how great a product is and no matter how much it was built on ideals etc, if it can’t sell then who the hell cares.
And you might not be techy, that’s cool, but no mater how you try and flip it and show that a few non tech people care, in reality 99% of people don’t care! They are not gonna stop buying iPhones because its a PDA clone or stop using Twitter because its an IRC clone or stop using Google and go back to Yahoo. Just not gonna happen! Just like no one stopped buying iPods cause Apple didn’t invent it.
Everyday people don’t want to write applications, people just want to pick up their tech and use it to make everyday life faster and to be connected. Which is why Apple is so popular. No one wants to fiddle with tech if they don’t have to. They just want to pick it up and it mostly work. Doctors, psychologists, economists, professors, historians at least in America are some of the LAST people to get on the tech bandwagon. Most doctors are tech adverse which is why the government is almost forcing them to go to digital medical records and things of that nature.
In the end we are just going back and forth the reality is Apple, MS and even Google are here to stay. The lawsuits and crazy patents are here to stay. Get over it.
Hard to tell that you are that old really from your posts.
Saddens me to see that you don’t care and that you truly believe that it is now said and done.
I don’t live in the past, I simply will not forget it. It influences our here and now and helps us to better create a future. I embrace the future of technology daily, and I can give you as many examples of those professionals as you that do to your’s that don’t.
I look forward to owning a Microsoft Surface though I will not be running Windows 8 on my desktop. I will be receiving my Raspberry Pi soon, and I am very excited about it because it does represent that ‘past’ you seem to want to trade in on and deny. It is open. It is freedom. And it gets kids and adults programming again.
No I won’t get over it. Program or be programmed as Ruskoff correctly wrote. Good luck with your choice.
I don’t have a problem with anything you said. And I don’t have a problem with people who want to see the reality of the past, find the truth, take a different path etc. I love reading and learning about things like the Lilth etc. My issue is when the reason you are showing the past is to bash the present.
For instance my screen name is “Windows Sucks” because I don’t particularly like MS Windows. But I don’t then go on every MS post on the site and bash Windows and MS, its my opinion and you can see from my screen name my opinion but I am sure that no one wants to hear it from me on every post.
If you want to show me the past and PDA’s and how they relate to today’s tech, that’s fine, when it becomes a bash Apple exercise then I take a little offense to it. Same as I would if it was all bashing Google or all bashing MS.
I appreciate your reasoning though I disagree, and here is why. Right now, Apple needs bashing. What is being done needs to be made consciously aware not only for techies like yourself but non-techies like myself.
During the height of Microsoft’s worst practices, they too needed ‘bashing’ as you put it. And while things will never be absolutely ‘hunky dory’ with Microsoft, their corporate culture has changed enough where the bashing is not as necessary. Just simple reminders of their past are sufficient.
And if Google or any other corporation, tech oriented or not, were to act as Apple is now (sociopathic in my professional opinion) then absolutely they need bashing too.
So I am quite glad that Thom and others are publishing article and after article reminding everyone that while Apple is currently the top dog and has done some great things from the past into the present, they still are revising history, abusing the patent system, and following a dead man’s psychological obsession. That definitely deserves constant ‘bashing’.
Wow, that has to be the most excruciatingly verbose statement of the “appeal to popularity/majority” fallacy that I have ever read.
I have been reading OSNews for years and after this verdict was returned, I finally had to sign up to respond to some of the most asinine comments I have truly ever seen.
What year did the iPhone come out? 2007 is the correct answer. iOS offered a series of icons that lead to various installed features, showed a battery gauge at the top with a connection status and the time. With iOS 2.x, an app store was offered for adding other software features to this ‘smartphone’. It was described in a 2008 review as combining a wide-screen iPod, a mobile phone, and the web. Wow sounds incredible, right?
No, a PDA is not a phone, however in the early 2000’s, Handspring and Palm were making hybrid PDA/Smartphones. Here is a review of the Treo600 from CNET in 2003 – http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/palm-treo-600-at/4505-6452_7-30… . In their review they specifically reference the Treos as being PDA/phones and the Treo600 as being one of the best.
In 2006, one year prior to the release of the iPhone, the Treo680 debuted. Go look it up please. Notice the lack of antenna and how it was evolving into the next wave of ‘smartphones’ which would be rounded rectangular objects. Notice that while it had a host of buttons and a keyboard that it was a touchscreen device that was also evolving. Notice the grid of icons, the battery gauge at the top, the connection status and the time. Please read about all of the advanced features of Palm OS 5.x including audio/video playback, web-browsing, email, fully supported phone features, document support, full PIM features, and support for third party applications.
Wow, a PDA that you could make calls on, and it had audio/video playback (like an iPod), mobile phone support through AT&T (yeah the same AT&T that was exclusive for the iPhone a year later) and the web (yeah, web browsing and rich email support via phone, wireless, or even bluetooth if you set it up properly).
In other words, the iPhone was not revolutionary. It was not innovative. It was evolutionary. That can be applauded. But it was still built on the technology, the feature sets, and the history of PDA’s and smartphones that came before it. Thom is right about the loss of memory from even 10 years ago about the actual history of so much computing technology.
This case and its unfortunate verdict goes right to the heart of this very problem, and I do agree with Thom that the long-term results are likely to be quite harmful to the tech world and the consumers it ‘claims’ to serves.
One last image to leave you with – http://photos.northtemple.com/iphone_braun.jpg . Jobs has always borrowed and stolen ideas from the past to incorporate and market in the present. Bauhaus is one excellent example of this.
Before you accuse me of being a ‘fanboy’ (what a term!), I am almost a half a century old. I grew up literally with Jobs, Woz, Gates, and the entire personal computing world. I have owned everything from an Apple II to a G5 running Leopard, from a Compaq running DOS 3.x to a Dell quad-core running Windows 7 x64, from a Sparcstation 5 running Solaris 7 to a laptop running Scientific Linux. I have used Palm pilots for work and currently only own a dumb phone. I have a Zenithink Gingerbread OS tablet, and I own an original iPod. I have been programming since Apple Pascal and Borland Turbo languages. Yet, my main fields are not IT proper. I have graduate degrees in economics and behavioral psychology. My perspective is a unique one and much like the judge in the Google v. Oracle case, I am in the minority on sites like these (likely why I waited so long to join and comment) and a dying demographic as the Millennials grow up being controlled by technology and passive comsumption, not controlling it themselves through active programming and content creation.
As Santayana said in Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Then if Apple copied and it wasn’t right let those companies sue Apple just the same. Nokia did. (They sued Apple before Apple sued anyone else)
No one said Apple didn’t copy others, the point is they didn’t PHOTOCOPY like Samsung did and that’s the point. (In this case)
Samsung did counter-sue. This case had problems as described on Groklaw and really is far from over. Motorola is suing Apple. Others will follow if this verdict stands on appeal. It will be the patent war that really should not come about but will have to due to Apple’s over-reach here.
Market leaders rise and then they fall. At their peak, they will do everything and I do mean everything to maintain that status. A monopoly is formed and some very unscrupulous acts occur particularly when the ghost of a narcissist is behind a corporate entity.
Look at what Microsoft did in the 1990’s. Apple is doing it now. Look further back in history. Do some research on the British East India Trading Company. They maintained their monopoly status with an actual military force for hundreds of years before a rebellion finally took it down.
I could care less about Samsung as a corporation. This fine will barely touch their bottom-line. What I do care about is the beginning of Apple hegemony in the mobile space. I care about a patent war that will slow down innovation, invention, and evolution of technology for years to come. I care about choice and the freedom to choose.
If Apple can win a patent lawsuit on a rectangle with rounded edges, then I will loose that freedom of choice in the very near future. This will not encourage other corporations to ‘innovate’ or ‘invent’ new technology. They will simply pull out of that market and the barriers to entry for smaller firms will be even greater. If Microsoft and Apple sue Android phones out of existence, and they could with this current patent nonsense, then we what will occur next? What will that final battle between these two sick corporations look like? How will this affect you and me and others consumers?
You might think this is hyperbole but this is sadly how humans have always been psychologically and economically. Cycles repeat over and over and over.
The iPhone has around 32% share in the US. At best, 15-18% worldwide. It has 5-8% of the total mobile phone market.
The iPad does have a great deal of market share, but mostly because the competition sucks. It saw some losses of market share with the rise of the Kindle but since then it has regained share — but the situation remains fluid. Apple actually lost on the iPad design patents.
What monopoly do you see Apple forming using litigation as a stick?
For now this is correct. Could this change if Apple continues to win cases such as this one? Sure.
I quoted this line only because for me it is the most psychologically relevant to the discussion. Did you ever own an original Xbox? They were pretty sucky when they were released. They didn’t compare well at all to the Playstation 2 or the Sega Dreamcast. But Microsoft could afford to release a ‘not quite good enough’ product. And they got a following with a few really good titles. Then came the first generation of the 360. It was much better, wasn’t? No not really as it had a horrible design flaw which led to constant overheating issues. Finally, the newest generation Xbox 360 has these solved. It is a decent gaming console.
Apple and Jobs did not use a monopoly position with the introduction of the iPhone but they did use very skillful psychological manipulation in the form of marketing influence. The original iPhone sucked when compared to established smartphone leaders like Palm and their Treo680. Feature for feature, hardware and software wise, the original iPhone as a package was not that great of a device. It did get better with each evolutionary release of both the hardware (remember the antenna problems) and the software (wasn’t till iOS 2.x that an appstore was released.)
The iPad is not the ‘best’ tablet out there with all of the competition sucking. If you step away from the influence and actually compare the technology, the software features, etc. there are a great many good tablets including the iPad, particularly now that it has, yes, here is that word again, evolved. My Zenithink is excellent. The Galaxy Tabs are excellent. The Asus Transformers are excellent. The Microsoft Surface looks like it is going to be excellent. I may hate ‘Metro’ on the desktop, but it is going to be exceptional on the Surface.
As Galvanash correctly points out, if software patents are upheld that shouldn’t be, and if trade dress issues are confused further with patents, and if Apple succeeds in getting first Samsung and then other phone manufacturers products barred from the US market, that will leave Apple and Microsoft alone in the arena. For now Microsoft and Apple hold cross-licensing agreements. If they are the only one’s left standing, this will change as others have already mentioned.
So yes, for now, Apple seems far from a monopoly status, but it does not mean with the capital they have, the consumer popularity they enjoy, and now the legalities of a screwed up patent system, that they may not sooner than many would ever expected become the monopoly force in the hand-held and tablet markets.
We shall see.
You used an awful lot of words to say: No, Apple does not have a monopoly but I will keep repeating the FUD of someday in the distant future their may be a threat of them becoming one.
Please read this article on monopolies and at least attempt to educate yourself somewhat before you embarrass yourself further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
Read this:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/26/us-apple-samsung-microsof…
Notice that Asian mobile manufactures are ‘scared’ of this verdict and the ramifications including future Apple patent lawsuits. So if Android becomes ‘unsafe’, where do they turn?
Well, of course, Windows mobile. However, Windows mobile is currently a distant third compared to Android and iOS. Consumers want phones to be like the iPhone and iOS which means the current phones even with Android that ‘infringes’ patents. If Windows mobile does not gain ground, what is left? Yes, Apple only. That then leads to a monopoly. Reading the Wiki article you will see the other important features of monopolization and its effects on markets.
Again, please look at history. No one knew that Standard Oil would become a monopoly or when exactly. No one knew that AT&T would become a monopoly or when exactly. No one in the 1970’s when Microsoft was founded knew that within 25 years, they would hold a monopoly in the OS on PC’s and that they would subsequently be sued by the DOJ for predatory monopolistic practices.
But, those in the field of economics learn from studying such case studies and learn to predict the probability of such things happening again with other companies in other markets. That is all I, and others far smarter than myself, are doing with regards to Apple. Many of us do not like what we are seeing at all.
FUD my a*s! I am not trying to sell you something. This isn’t a team sport for me where I want to have my team win and your team lose. This isn’t a ‘fanboy’ my genitals are bigger than your genitals game.
Monopolies are bad for markets, consumers, innovation, invention, etc. It will be no more advantageous for all of us to have Apple in the monopoly position in the ‘post PC world’ any more than it was to have Microsoft in the monopoly position in the desktop world of the 1990’s and early 2000’s.
One reason I don’t post very often on forums is that real thinking and discussion does require an awful lot of words. To reduce it to pithy sound-bytes, tweets, and short Facebook comments dumbs down intellectual discourse.
Even more words to say that Apple is not a monopoly but there is some nebulous FUD threat that they will sue everybody until they do have one!
You have no intention of actually debating the merits of my arguments. You simply attempt to shut it down by repeatedly calling it FUD.
I have tried to be polite, but obviously intelligent discourse is wasted on you as you lack the skills necessary for critical thinking in the first place.
Of course, I don’t expect you to see that Apple, by exploiting corrupted patent system (largely broken exactly by such corps… originally, the system was meant to protect truly novel ideas, not every modest remix that comes along), wishes to create a monopoly (that’s pretty much the definition of a patent, all about a legally granted monopoly) on the most vague and obvious of ideas… to stop all others from using what are pretty much the only sensible designs.
In doing that, Apple has an unstated wish of depraving most of the world, all the “lesser” people, from the advancements made mostly by the tech industry at large… (1. Apple openly states the desire to target only the few most “profitable” percentages of people 2. Apple also quite openly wishes to block any advancements they supposedly bring from being used by other manufacturers – when you bring those two to their logical synthesis…)
Edited 2012-09-03 00:18 UTC
+100
Although I do think it was revolutionary and innovative, just not as far as the underlying technology goes. It was revolutionary and innovative in its design tradeoffs:
1. Users will accept 5-15 hours of battery life on a phone, even though many devices of the day easily doubled that.
2. Users will accept a non-replaceable battery if it can survive long enough.
3. Focus on consumers, not business. Get to the business market through the bottom, not the top.
etc. etc. Most geeks don’t think this stuff matters much. I do. I think that is actually what makes Apple special – they don’t make design tradeoffs lightly. They think about them very hard and when they decide to make them, they commit to them. Hard.
But none of this changes your overall point. I think you are right on with that.
Edited 2012-08-26 21:23 UTC
Thank you.
And I will agree with what you are saying. Jobs fancied himself more an artist and a designer than a technologist, programmer, or engineer. He was also brilliant at marketing and understood the psychology of persuasion & how to exploit it. Most ‘consumers’ will accept all of the trade-off’s you have mentioned because they are easily manipulated into believing it is in their best self-interest to do so.
Given Jobs love of art & design, I always laugh thinking about how all artists & designer copy all the time. (He knew this hence the often sourced quote!) That is ultimately how ‘movements’ start. Imagine if Monet had ‘patented’ small dots on canvas in various colors to represent water? Imagine if Picasso had ‘patented’ cube like shapes on canvas replacing real rounded body parts? Would Cubism or Impressionism ever occurred? No.
I have no problem giving Apple and Jobs credit for some inspired creative designs though personally they are not my taste. However, to have them use the legal system to to control competition really means a stifling of that creativity they hold and held so dear.
Let’s turn it around for minute. What if Nokia, HP, Motorola & Samsung had barred entry into the mobile market by controlling trade dress so vehemently, charging excessive licensing fees, and using ‘obvious’ patents to stop the potential future Apple from becoming competitive? How could Jobs & Apple have done anything creatively which, while based on prior art, was still exciting enough to move the industry forward with the release of the iPhone? They would not have been able to do so, and if Apple wins at this ‘game’ it is my informed assessment that neither will others.
Oh great, another genius who thinks that “LOL” is punctuation.
Yeah, if only someone had come up with a device that bridged the gap between phones and PDAs… some kind of intelligent telephone (or “smart” phone if you will).
So when you add a cellular antenna to a PDA, it stops being a PDA? I hate to be the one to break this to you, but that’s what modern smartphones are.
Errr, the original iPhone did have PDA functionality, even if it was badly-implemented and practically useless.
Well it’s very simple. If the copying Apple did is wrong then let those companies Apple copied sue.
Everyone is talking like Apple did all this copying and they shouldn’t be able to sue to defend the patents they were legally given??? Or that all this prior is out there and they shouldn’t be able sue.
Please let those who have the prior art step up and say what Apple did is a copy.
The prior art Samsung pulled out got laughed at in court. Old PDAs and pictures from the movie 2001 or the Knight Ridder tablet that looks like a nook and not an iPad.
In the end, Apple can be sued like anyone else. If they copied sue them.
Uh, no. It was used to successfully invalidate Apple’s patents the world over.
Yet just utterly failed in this trial, and in Germany, France and Italy.
Even Wikipedia calls you out on this:
So a smartphone, quite literally, is a PDA that can make phone calls. And just to give you a shortlist:
* Nokia Communicator 9000, 9110, 9210, 9500 and E90
* HP Jornada 928
* Sharp Zaurus MT-300C
* Essentially all BlackBerries
(and lots more)
This is something that bugged me too! When reading one of the interviews with one of the jurors I was surprised to find that the subject of prior art came up, but then some of the other jurors said that the subject of prior art was off topic and everyone agreed to move on without considering prior art. I can’t say I am convinced of a conspiracy here, but I just don’t think the jurors really had the opportunity to further investigate the idea of prior art. I don’t feel like the judge gave them that opportunity. They were told to focus on Apple vs Samsung and nothing else. Granted I am basing my thoughts based on one article I’ve read according to one juror.
I also hate to get down to the nitty-gritty but I am also curious to know, out of all the jurors, which had iphones and which had other devices. I am curious to know if personal bias played a role (if any).
Regarding the design patents, I’m not sure whether its good or bad. The software ‘patents’ are what scares the heck out of me. Not that I am actively developing anything in relation to the ‘patents’ but does anyone have a resource that is clear on the implications of this ruling on individual developers that want to implement, for example, pinch to zoom in their software? Is it the code that was patented or is it the feature itself that is patented. I seem to read arguments that go from “You’re OK Apple won’t get you” to a lot of plausible FUD.
the apple circle interface started off as a navigation wheel, just like the circles on the pdas in thom’s picture. so what’s the innovation, removing the some of the navigation?
and the iphone has app launching buttons along the bottom of the screen, just like the pdas in thom’s picture. what’s the innovation there, moving the buttons onto the touch screen with software? palm would have done this too if the technology was good enough. but they had crappy touchscreens that demanded stylus use, which demanded having the graffiti area, which demanded using so much of their precious screen space that there was no room left to wast on buttons you could make with plastic.
oh there I go again, getting drawn into a rant party. thom you little devil
“The iPhone did not introduce the concept of a mobile device with a fully touch-screen operated user interface and few buttons. This was a concept ingrained in the mobile industry since the late ’80s and early ’90s, and acclaimed and/or popular technology enthusiasts like Dan Frakes, John Gruber, Marco Arment, and the countless others who retweeted this nonsense are doing the industry a huge disservice by ignoring this obvious fact.”
The iPhone changed the way PDA’s and Phones were merged. Thereby changing both industries. There is no market for PDAs anymore and smartphones now follow the iPhone formula. This new formula works evidenced by the explosion of the smartphone market.
People that would never carry a PDA phone are now carrying smartphones. It beggars belief that you can’t see this obvious fact. Your Apple didn’t do anything that wasn’t already obvious stance seems to have blinded you.
Edited 2012-08-26 14:52 UTC
You seem to be blinded by the fact that market success has no bearing on this article, much in the same way that just because Windows is more popular it’s not better than Mac OS X.
Edited 2012-08-26 14:56 UTC
iPhone’s market success was not what I commented on. I said every new smartphone follows the iPhone principle. Thus the market was changed and established. A vast majority of the people didn’t care for smartphones or PDAs your article mentions. Show me a pure PDA market in the last few years.. How many were launched and what were the sales figures like?
It wasn’t jus the device. Apple made data plans mandatory and now in the U.S every smartphone comes with it. That changed the way people use these devices.
Well, you can use Google, right? Just search for market share data for Palm (and Rim) in 2006, when the Treo680 came out (which was a smartphone in every sense of the word). I think you could be surprised.
That’s true, but in my view that’s all they did: making smartphones more attractive for the masses, and producing a version which could be liked by the average guy. But rounded corners and icon grids and whatnot? Yeah, right.
I don’t think any large group of people is saying the iPhone started mobile computing. What the iPhone did is mark a shift in what people expect from a mobile phone.
It is a milestone and Thom & co trying for 5 years to prove it isn’t kind of proves it is.
Soon the next iPhone will arrive. It will be disappointing, mark the end of Apple, be ridiculed, it will be pointed out it has new features that Android already has and sell more units than the previous iPhone. As usual.
Point me to where I claim it is NOT a milestone. Please. Do so.
Of course the iPhone is a milestone – it had a huge impact. However, it’s not a milestone because it did anything new or for the first time; it did things better. And rightfully so Apple got rewarded for it.
I’ve said so in countless articles. You appear to be putting words into my mouth because you have no way to address the actual article at hand.
In the article you cite these historic facts that no one seems to be disputing. I for one I don’t dispute them. I have a few Palms, MessagePads, PocketPCs, Psions and others. Palm and Handspring devices were in fact very popular with Apple users.
But you always make it sound the world is mad and the iPhone is some rebranded Palm Pilot.
If was up to me Palm would still be in business.
I think the people that say the iPhone wasn’t a milestone are as dumb as the Apple brainwashed fans that pretend Apple invented everything.
The iPhone was a wake-up call for the whole phone industry. They took some existing ideas, invented/refined some others and they polished it in a way that nobody ever did before. That’s Apple’s strength: they polish their products so that what was a niche product ends up being useful for the masses.
Now, the somewhat political question that this whole trial raise is : should a company have a legal way to block its concurrent from copying them or is the fact that they will be first to market a big enough advantage in itself ?
The Apple users I know IRL, the Apple fans and plain users, nor the Apple supporters on this site don’t claim, as far as I have noticed, Apple invented everything.
What I do notice is the Apple haters/Google fans make up these kind of claims and then ridicule Apple and its customers.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with taking hints from the competition. Apple showed the future and the competition took notice, nothing wrong with that.
What is wrong, IMO, when a company like Samsung copies everything, including stuff not related to the functioning of the device itself (like packaging, commercials, icons).
Before Apple they copied RIM and Nokia. They don’t add anything to consumer choice, they just offer copies, more of the same. Just try to get a smart phone that doesn’t display a grid of icons for you to touch.
If this was purely a trade dress case… Well frankly I would still think it is stupid and pointless, but honestly I wouldn’t care a whole lot. If the jury looked at all the evidence and found that Samsung largely copied Apple’s trade dress – fine. Whatever.
Its the software patents that concern me, not the trade dress nonsense. If you only look at trade dress, Samsung is definitely the obvious target – few if any of the other phone makers skirted that close to the line. This would be the end of it – Apple won, case closed. Everyone would go on with their own thing.
But the patents! Everyone is affected by that. If this holds up Apple is not going to stop with Samsung…
A whole bunch of companies release touch-based PDAs and phones and none of them gain traction.
One company gets the formula right and explodes all over the market. Other subsequently release phones that behave just like that one.
One company went as far as copying the icons and packaging.
OK, it was obvious.
Can we move on now. Please.
It was an obvious mistake for the other companies. They should have protected that idea.
Unless the idea is very old, like the wheel, you can protect any idea, even if you stole it.
totally irrelevant !
all these devices, combined, in 10 years, was not sold in fraction of iPhone numbers.
why? because they did not have features of iPhone.
All they have some _major_ flaw (that stuck for years!)
iPhone is first device/PDA for “rest of us”
(btw I am not “rest of us”: I also used Palm Pilots, Nokia Communicators and Compaq/HP iPaqs for years…)
—
I absolutely agree: they did not. BUT iPhone did bring “mobile computing” to the masses at scale that is not comparable with any previous device.
No Atari Portfolio???
Sure it was a “real” PC, but it did have a PDA size and build in PIM apps.
😛
no.
it run crappy DOS
Crappy? Then explain how people could hack ATM’s and break in to the Cyberdyne Systems lab using an Atari Portfolio!
it was special version with TOS
Thank you for mentioning, that as great as iPhone is, it has built on the previous work. Everyone seems to forget about all the linux based palm computers. It just took time for a bigger company like Mac to develop something serious in this market. This is similar to an investor, who doesn’t want to invest in a product until he can see that there is demand. Apple waited until it saw a demand in palm computing. Then it invested into it on a huge scale, and came up with a great product.
Kudos to the original author of the article. Here is bitcookie 8635 for you. Enjoy.
The reactions over here make me wonder.
First there is Tony Swash stating:
“the role of Apple’s innovation in the history of personal computing”
Now I have been around the IT business for about 30 years and I consider that role as non existent. Apple never played a significant role in business IT and it does not now, I do not know of any innovations originating form Apple, they have only copied, made it into a shiny device to satisfy their tribes of believers.
Second, there is TM99, giving some real insight and the fitting quote,
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
His reaction went under in the button-nobutton nonsense, that is a pity. The historic facts he has given are worth checking before one starts to give his opinion based on . . . on what? Believes? Assumptions?
I do find that a genuinely weirdly narrow and crippled view of tech history, especially coming from anybody interested in the history of personal computing. Oh well. Takes all sorts. Happy dreams
No, he’s right.
Easily for 99% of businesses Apple has, until very recently, been completely non-existant.
Even now, it’s only the “must have gadget” for the hipster crowd that may very well fall out of favour in the future – who knows.
So many people are buying the iPads and iPhones and they’re not even sure what they’re supposed to be doing with them. You download a few apps, play some angry birds and then you just go back to using the phone as per usual.
I only even saw Macs in educational departments and in use by the occasional graphic designer. They were a pretty cool (albeit expensive) niche product, and while they had a pretty quirky fan base, I never had much against (or for) them.
Maybe If I had more money than I knew what to do with, I would have bought one, but as it stood they never repesented great value for money.
But now we enter the Apple “reality distortion field” – where people such as yourself want to elevate Apple to a position it never held. This attitude is rapidly eroding any good will people have for this company.
To be clear: They have always made fine products, they have contributed tremendously to the field of computer usability, but for goodness sake, recognise the fact that they are NOT alone, they they are NOT the only player in town and ALL of these companies borrow ideas from one another.
DARE to open your eyes to the article Thom has posted. See those devices? What do they look like? Will you allow yourself to make the admission that perhaps Apple borrowed an idea or two from them? Consider then the injustice of attributing all major innovations to a single company. Try to be a bit more fair and open minded.
I asked you in another thread, but I will ask you again: Do you have a dog in this fight? I suspect you have more than a passing interest in Apple’s well-being here.
I can only imagine Janvl and you live in North Korea or some other country cut of from the rest of the world.
http://pandodaily.com/2012/08/25/copying-works-how-samsungs-decisio…
What Samsung did was logical, made good business sense and was successful. Apple’s legal response to What Samsung did was logical, made good business sense and looks like being successful.
You’re a classic – trying to create a nice diversion from Thom’s post. Try to stick to the topic – Apple have copied too. But dead men tell no tales, and in this case, dead companies can’t sue.
The link you posted… Proclaiming it to be a good analysis. Here is an excerpt from it:
This is from your post describing the outcome of the trial (titled “Everyone Wins”):
????????????????????
If you agree with an analysis stating that Samsung copying Apple was good for consumers… How do you then think that a trial outcome punishing them for it is also good for consumers…
I think you’ve been baking in Steve’s reality distortion field for too long…
Guys…
Neil Armstrong passed away.
Thom Holwerda writes: “As a geek, I do not want history to be revised to make it seem as if mobile computing started with the iPhone and Android – I want credit to go where it’s due: Palm. The Zoomer was the first fully touch-screen operated graphical PDA, in 1992 (before the Newton, even), and PalmOS is the common ancestor to all that came after it: PocketPC, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and everything else.”
As a longtime geek myself I remember the timeline somewhat differently. I owned both the original Newton Message Pad and a variety of Palm devices back when they were relevant. The Newton, while flawed, was a much more sophisticated device with a much more highly developed UI. The Palm was simpler, which was actually a strength given the state of hardware technology at the time, but it followed the Newton, and owned the market by premiering at an incredibly low price. The more sophisticated Newton could not compete at that price level, and with negative reviews of its earliest incarnation had little chance of succeeding.
While the iPhone is certainly not the first PDA, Apple was in this market before Palm. And if you want to go back to the Psion devices, apart from size and apps such as contacts, calendar, and calculator there is little comparable with devices which came after it.
A few citations I found that confirm my memory:
Wikipedia’s entry for Palm says “The company started to create a PDA for consumers, called the Zoomer (1993).” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm,_Inc.
According to Venture Navigator “In August 1993, Apple began shipping its Newton. Palm’s Zoomer followed in October. ” Palm didn’t really enter the PDA market until January ’96
http://www.venturenavigator.co.uk/content/161
Thank you…
I remember it this way too!
Not saying the Newton was first, I’m sure there is something somewhere to prove otherwise, but the Palm certainly wasn’t.
I owned a Palm by the way, not a Newton…
The Zoomer was not technically a Palm device…
The hardware was made by Tandy/Casio (Casio called their version the ZPAD – they were indentical for the most part).
It was originally released in 1992 (very late in the year). The reason Thom is linking it to Palm is that Jeff Hawkins started Palm as a software company – and the software that the Zoomer ran was written by Palm. He started the company for the express purpose of writing software for this device (in cooperation with Tandy – who was for a short time his employer after they bought his former company GRID Systems).
A bit later Palm also created the Graffiti handwriting recognition software for the Zoomer (and other PEN/GEOS devices like the HP OmniGo 100) and the Newton.
Palm did not themselves release an actual self branded PDA until 1996, and it was entirely different from the earlier Zoomer (both in hardware and in software). However, for all intents and purposes the Zoomer was Jeff Hawkins brainchild, the “original” touch screen PDA.
Apple didn’t release the Newton until 1993, about a year after the Zoomer was released.
ps. I am NOT at all saying that Apple copied the Zoomer – just that the Zoomer technically was first to market. They were just similar devices arrived at by different companies independently (in many ways the Zoomer was more sophisticated than the original Palm Pilot was).
Can you site sources for the Zoomer being released in ’92? The two sources I quoted say the Zoomer was released in ’93, after the Newton.
Apparently Apple had a prototype of a touch operated phone in 1983:
http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/apples-first-touchscreen-phone…
Another interesting tidbit…
Ironically (since this thread was talking about the Zoomer and Palm) – tying back to our current court case you can get the following reverse chronology:
Thom points out that most modern Smartphones are decedents of the Palm Pilot (1996), created by Jeff Hawkins
… who originally wrote the software for what most consider to be the first touchscreen PDA, the Zoomer (1992)
… who previously worked for GRID Systems and designed the GRIDPad, what is widely considered to be the fist touchscreen Tablet (1989)
… which was actually manufactured by, take a guess
… Samsung
And the we all go spinning down the rabbit hole
It just makes you wonder what kind of prototypes have been made that never managed to escape the lab to reach public knowledge.
No doubt IBM must have a whole lot of stuff in some dark dungeon.
Yes! Thank you. I was going to post the same evolutionary history.
You are absolutely spot on with this, and isn’t it ironic?
Me and you are about the same age (from what you said in your previous post). Well, you have me by about 5 years or so. My first computer was a TI99/4A.
Nice to have another old guy around
Yes, we are definitely right around the same age give or take a few years. One of my best friends had a TI99/4A. It was a wonderful little machine. My first was the early model Apple II. I upgraded to a IIe and that machine was upgraded for many years with various motherboard and case swaps, expansion cards including a Mockingbird and a Z80 card, and eventually an external modem. I still have that old machine and fire it up from time to time.
Thanks, it is good to be here.
Can any of you Zoomer-believers actually verify 1992? I’ve seen it around but I imagine it’s just some folks aping the 8-Bit Micro site’s info. There are just as many other sources that say that it debuted at CES 1993. I can even find articles that state that it was shown off after the Newton MessagePad but was actually released first. I know for certain Sculley showed off the Newton for the first time in the summer of 1992. I cannot find any credible evidence that the Zoomer was shown or available in ’92 other than a couple of sites stating it as so.
My own memory, and the early state of Palm, makes me believe they did not turn out an OS within a few months of being incorporated.
Ha! I even forgot the Zoomer ran GeoSystems OS. The OS wasn’t even built by Palm!
The Wikipedia article on Jeff Hawkins clearly states that Palm was founded in 1992 and released the Zoomer. The Newton came out around the same time in late 1993.
I think you are missing the point that Hawkins invented Graffiti which was used by both devices. Hawkins was instrumental in developing pen computing and tablet computing with GRiD several years before the development of the Newton. At best they were contemporaries sharing newly designed technologies. Nowadays, Apple ‘fans’ tend to downplay other innovators and inventors and rewrite history so that it is always Apple that did it first when that it is simply not true.
Yes, The Wikipedia article on Jeff Hawkins clearly states that Palm was founded in 1992 and released the Zoomer… after the Newton in ’93.
Here’s another citation quoting Hawkins as saying the Newton came first:
http://www.pencomputing.com/palm/Pen33/hawkins2.html
Graffiti was on neither the Zoomer or the original Newton MessagePad. The Zoomer used an earlier recognition system called PalmPrint which was horrible.
Graffiti was based on Xerox PARC’s Unistrokes. Palm got a demonstration of Unistrokes from PARC before they created their Graffiti system. Xerox successfully sued them for violating their patent.
Here’s actual coverage of CES ’93 saying the Zoomer wasn’t out yet:
http://www.caruso.com/work/dm-index/digital-media-june-1993/more-vi…
Here’s a book on the history of Palm by Andrea Butler and David Pogue saying that it was slated to launch in ’92 but they didn’t get prototypes until the spring of ’93 and that it was shown for the first time at CES in 1993:
http://books.google.com/books?id=lsFHU305YL0C&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=t…
Edited 2012-08-27 16:36 UTC
Read carefully… There is more than one CES within a given year. The June CES was the summer CES. The Tandy Zoomer was demonstrated again at that CES. But it was _also demonstrated at the Winter CES (1st week of January 1993) and also at a few international trade events in Dec of 1992.
http://www.caruso.com/work/dm-index/digital-media-january-1993/news…
They actually shipped (as in available to customers) within months of each other. I distinctly remember seeing a Zoomer at Radio Shack when it was released – and at the time I was waiting for the MessagePad to become available.
I don’t have proof. I have never been able to find an actual release date for the Zoomer, just generalities.
Regardless, it was demonstrated successfully first to the public as a complete product. Not by much – it doesn’t really matter. They are close enough together that I don’t think it is really fair to say that either one of “beat” the other to market. I simply refer to the Zoomer as being first as a jab at Apple because everyone else says the Newton MessagePad was – its meaningless in both instances.
I’ve read my links, I don’t see anything about “AGAIN.” The word doesn’t appear in the first link in any context. In fact, did you read that Hawkins/Palm got their hands on the first prototype in Spring? Did you miss the part where the Newton was demoed in Summer ’92?
I acknowledged that the Zoomer was released first. But it wasn’t demonstrated until well after the Newton had been (the summer of ’92 vs. the summer of ’93). Read carefully….
Correct
Hawkins himself and several sources disagree with you.
It’s good to know that you are just trolling and can be ignored. Seriously? You admit that this is horrible evidence but you use it anyway because you like to poke people with sticks… Sad.
Edited 2012-08-27 17:37 UTC
Frankly, I don’t know which source is right… But you didn’t read the link that I posted:
Winter CES was Jan 1993 in Las Vegas. The link YOU posted was about Summer CES in Chicago, which was June 1993. They are both from the same author.
Well it would be Summer 92 vs Winter 92 if they in fact did present a prototype at the Winter CES show as stated in the link I posted. But I do know that Apple’s Summer 92 demo was just that – a demo. It was not a fully working prototype, it was an instrumented demo.
http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/john-sculley-newton-origin.html
That was Summer 92. The demo they did for Winter 92 (Las Vegas) was not instrumented. If the Winter 92 Zoomer prototypes (assuming they did in fact exist) were fully fleshed out, then they were demoed independently at the same event. But I have never been able to find out any more about the supposed Zoomer demo done at Winter 92 CES
– so it may well be a moot point.
Again, sources differ. That is why I still say it doesn’t much matter – they were essentially developed and released in tandem. But Ill concede that the book reference you gave is likely more correct than a couple of random internet quotes I have run across over the years. I was not aware of the book to be honest.
Just stressing I was NOT trolling – I was posting information I thought to be accurate. Maybe its not, sorry about that.
Im not trolling. I was making a point. It is just as “correct” to say one or the other came first (even ignoring discrepancies in information). The newton was disclosed to the public first, but the Zoomer was technically available first in retail. I prefer to say the Zoomer was “first” because everyone else ignores it ever existed…
Either point of view is correct, and if you feel like I am poking you with a stick Im sorry.
In fact, I did, but you were already chastizing me to read carefully before you had posted it so I wanted to shut down the finger wagging.
Yes, I read it.
Well, no, it would be comparing the Summer of ’92 and January of ’93. (Claiming Winter ’92 in reference to CES when it is in fact in 1993 is a little too slippery for me; why don’t we just agree to use the actual dates rather than obscurely timeshifting?)
Well, the Palm book I cite says they didn’t receive prototypes at Palm until Spring of ’93. I’d rather trust a Palm exec writing the entire history of Palm referencing numerous sources with the aid of a reporter than some commenter on the internet who disagrees with the point, admits the Newton may likely have been first but at worst was contemporaneous, but continues to argue the point even though he keeps admitting he has little to no evidence to support his arguments.
Can we presume that since Hawkins concedes the Newton beat the Zoomer that if a demonstration occurred in January of 1993 that it was actually cruder, less complete than at least one or more of the Newton’s demonstration in the summer of ’92 or the CES Jan, ’93 demo?
You had earned me to your side at the beginning there: okay, he just likes to argue points for the sake of detail… But then you end with silliness that I cannot accept. Propeling something into Firsthood just because of its obscurity and others’s ignorance is just silliness.
Which point of view? That one or the other was first? It can depend on what you think of as first, but I don’t see how either one can be correct.
Of course, it seems you agree with me that the Zoomer does little in terms of establishing originality, invention, innovation ahead of the Newton so on that we can agree.
Edited 2012-08-27 20:15 UTC
That was the common terminology… CES had seasonal events – and the winter event was “around” new years – sometimes before, sometimes after. It was commonly referred to as “Winter CES”, and the year used being the year of the winter season. There is nothing slippery about it.
??? I agreed that the book was likely a better source… Like I said I did not know about the book.
Probably. I was just conjecturing.
Ugh… Im a fan of the Zoomer – so I name drop it when it can. It is equally worthy of the title of being the first touchscreen PDA. I have never said or implied that the Newton was a derivative of it – in fact I posted the opposite numerous times.
What I find to be siliness is that you are so bent out of shape over which one deserves “Firsthood”. I think they both do – equally – as I said before.
Yes…. and vise versa.
And I have a host of fandroids releasing the craptastic Tandy Zoomer a year earlier than it was to alter history too!
No, I’m perfectly fine with the fact that people were working on these areas.
What I’m not fine with is claiming that Apple does not and has never invented or innovated anything, however, a device that required a licensed OS, hardware manufacturing from Tandy and Casio, and marketing and distribution from those two hardware manufacturers, and Donna Dubinsky from Apple doing financing and recruiting (mostly from Apple) to keep the company afloat to produce a product AFTER the Newton that was an even bigger flop is somehow designated groundbreaking and revolutionary.
EXACTLY.
Does anyone here remember GEOS? Woof! It was a kind of mockup of the early Mac GUI running on 8-bit processors. You could “run” it on a C-64, I put run in quotes because it was more of a slow crawl.
Anybody here remember the build quality of Tandy or Casio devices? Woof again. Tandy’s DOS based computers were so bad they were practically a fork in the OS. Software which ran on them would list them as a separate compatible device, even though it was technically running the same OS.
The Zoomer was not prior art.
I had a Zoomer. I had a Messagepad. They were both very interesting little distractions that facinated me. Neither of them worked well – they were both horrible in their own unique ways.
Just saying, people have selective memories. Everyone’s products were horrible by todays standards in the early 90s – even Apples.
Not that it means anything… But my Messagepad stopped working at about 6 months old (1994?). The Zoomer was still working in 2001 or so when I threw it away…
Edited 2012-08-27 19:54 UTC
As did I, plus I also paid the ungodly sum at the time to get a Newton Developer’s Kit from Apple.
You are right. Both of them ‘sucked’ according to today’s standards. But as they evolved, one survived and thrived, and the other failed and was canceled. Later Palm’s were exceptional devices. I still use an m515 and a TX to this day. Sure, I enjoyed hacking my Newton 2100 but it was just that, hacking. I had to add a headphone jack in order to listen to music. I had to hack a way to get it to work with iTunes.
True, the Zoomer was not a commercial success but its successors, the Handsprings and Palms definitely were. They built on that foundation. The Newton was a commercial failure. According to the logic of most Apple ‘fans’ here, if something is a commercial success then it had to have been innovative, inventive, and well the cat’s meow, and if it failed, then it never was. So does that ‘truth’ apply in this case as well with the Newton?
I dont know… I remember my Zoomer fondly, even though it was clunky as all hell. But I liked GEOS, and I liked DOS (at the time), and for the most part the Zoomer felt like a little PC with a nice pen based GUI on top of it – a sort of frankensteins monster… It was fun to tinker with and it actually worked fairly reliably.
The Newton was something completely different. It had horrible battery life, it crashed all the time. But it was definitely not a PC, it felt like it was built to be exactly what it was, just that it fell a bit short of really being good.
The first time I played with a Palm Pilot it reminded me more of my MessagePad than my Zoomer. Not because it looked or worked like it – but because it felt engineered to be exactly what it was – except it felt like they finally got it right.
All Im saying is the Zoomer was important in the history of Palm and PDAs in general, but it was the catipillar to The Pilots butterfly. The Newton, on the other hand, always seemed to me to be a brilliant grand idea that they just never got where it was going – the public and Apple themselves gave up on it before they got the formula right.
Just because you dislike the OS it ran and considered the hardware makers second rate does not mean it was not prior art. It is as simple as that.
Did you actually ever use a Newton 100? Seriously, do you want to convince me it was not slow, buggy, and prone to hardware failures. Do you not remember how difficult it was to sync to your Mac? Do you not remember that it drained AAA batteries faster than a frat boy downing a keg? Do you not remember how horrid CalliGrapher’s handwriting recognition software was? It was even mocked on the Simpsons.
But, unlike you, I recognize that it was the first model, and I expected that. Only in this pop culture age where all things must be instantly ‘perfected’ and a ‘blockbuster’ do we tend to forget that all 1.x products form hardware to software tend to suck until the bugs are fixed or the products are canceled & hopefully revived years later in another form.
This is the very psychological tendency of historical revisionism that is being addressed in this side-topic. I ‘dislike’ this so it must not have been so. I ‘like’ that so it most assuredly must have been so. When you can look back at over 35 years of tech history, the picture is a lot more nuanced and wider than seen only through a partisan haze.
@TM99
Yes, I used the original MessagePad as an everyday device long enough to know that everything you say about it is true. I never used The Zoomer, but used a number of Palm devices sporadically, spending a couple years with a Palm V.
But I believe the author’s point in this article is that Apple followed into the already existing PDA market with the iPhone. Clearly the Zoomer and Newton were developed independently at the same time and Hawkins himself says the Newton came to market before The Zoomer.
From today’s technology blog on the Guardian, commenting on Thom attempt to rewrite history sans Apple.
The Patent is here
http://www.google.com/patents?id=jQ8dAAAAEBAJ&printsec=frontcover&d…
The drawings attached to the patent, which are worth a look, are here
http://www.google.com/patents/US5446882?printsec=drawing&dq=5,446,8…
Here is an idea: lets drop this tedious tech archaeology, the tech intellectual equivalent to trying to prove that Atlantis existed, and accept that stopping Android OEMs from copying Apple in the future (whether they did it in the past or not) will not stop them innovating and inventing. If they are up to it.
…and Hawkins began work on what would become the PDA back at GRiD, releasing the GRiDPAD in 1989. Not filing patents or showing non-functional demo units – no, an actual, working tablet in 1989.
The point is this: iOS is more like PalmOS than like Newton, which used a completely different paradigm (notebook) than PalmOS. The groundwork for PalmOS – handwriting recognition, touchscreen technology, etc. – was laid by Hawkins at GRiD, with the first product being the GRiDPAD in 1989, and the Zoomer in 1992/1993. PalmOS’ application-centric model would massively win out over the ill-fated notebook paradigm of the Newton and PenPointOS, so much so that iOS, Android, and everything else currently on the market uses the PalmOS application-centric model.
Which is a GOOD thing. I’m GLAD Apple adopted PalmOS’ model, since it’s a BILLION times better than the horrible notebook paradigm of the Newton. See how this works? Good ideas get copied – EVEN BY APPLE – and that’s how mankind progresses. What if Palm had monopolised its ideas and technology, forcing Apple to stick to the notebook paradigm? *shudders*
Edited 2012-08-28 10:24 UTC
No actually you aren’t fine with what is being said otherwise you wouldn’t bring up tired straw man arguments constantly.
Apple and its current fans have a mistaken mindset currently that says because our products are a commercial success, we did this first, best, or alone. We are the great innovators and Jobs, who was a narcisstic ass-hole was somehow a creative genius instead of the prick he really was. Therefore we deserve to receive legal protection and can control the market as we see fit. We can destroy Android simply because Jobs lost to Microsoft and by gods, he wasn’t going to lose again even after he was dead.
When others push back against that and say things like, well, there is prior art. Apple may have innovated that but they built it on the foundations done by this company or that company, you call us ‘fandroids’ or ‘haters’. You pull out straw men and tell us that we don’t see anything that Apple has done well.
Bullshit! I don’t know how old you are but I am willing to bet that I was using Apple products before you were even born. Some of us remember history. We know about Xerox PARC. We know and used Zoomers and Amigas. We know about GRiDPads. We had Newtons and used superior Palms. We remember SoundJam MP before Apple bought it and rebranded it as iTunes.
We remember the Apple Quicktake, which was called the first consumer digital camera, but we know that it was simply a rebranded Fuji or Samsung. Yeah, we remember that and know that iPhones and iPads contain more prior art from other companies like this so we do pause. We remember when Apple almost went out of business and now they are the highest grossing corporation ever. And we know that what goes up, will eventually come down.
So please give this line of reasoning a rest. It is quite tiresome and wholly unconvincing to those of us who were there from the beginning and those who may be young but at least take the time to educate themselves on what really has happened in the history of modern computing.
Well, I’m a greybeard who has been around since the end of the 1940s, and I gotta tell you that Apple’s recovery from where they were in 1997 to their current position goes way beyond whether they innovated anything. Arguably, there has not been another tech company that created an ecosystem and a strategy to leverage that ecosystem via a combination of hardware and software that found favor among tens of millions of ‘great unwashed’ as Apple has done.
They don’t sell their ‘shiny’ toys just to tech illiteratis….there are plenty of power users sprinkled in their customer mix. The truth is almost always more nuanced than one might think.
We agree very much in that it is quite nuanced and complex, and perhaps there are even many ‘truths’. I can even agree with the truth that Apple’s meteoric rise from near bankruptcy to where they are at today is intriguing and even laudable. I also never said that some power users ‘like’ or even ‘love’ Apple products. As a personal example of knowing that truth, I have a very close college friend who does doctoral level AI research and uses iPads with autistic children. He is not a ‘fanatic’ though, and the only reason why now it is possible for him to use such a device in his work is because of the BSD-likeness of OS X on the server side of the equation.
However, it is still a truth that they are over-valued in the market, and this will eventually be corrected. It is also a truth that Apple is crossing that line into litigation as a means to secure, maintain, and defend a hoped for monopoly position. And we both are old enough to objectively have observed and know the truth that Apple under Jobs has always done historical revisionism in its marketing. It didn’t happen during the Apple II years with Woz as a tempering influence. And it didn’t happen during the years when Jobs was off at NeXT and Pixar. But under Jobs (either alive or dead) it has.
In a way responding to you about this, I am making a larger point with this as well. Because the Newton was created during the years when Jobs was gone, Apple didn’t act then like they had invented the holy grail alone. Apple even licensed Hawkins character recognition software as their initial one didn’t work out so well. So credit was given to Sculley and Apple for coining the term “PDA” even though they and all others knew there had been PDA’s (in other forms and maybe not as successful but PDA’s nonetheless) prior to the Newton and would be others thereafter. And by those of us who used Newtons, credit was given for their genuine innovations that they brought to the market segment.
Apple after Jobs is now showing us with this court case that Cook intends to keep Apple as they have been under Jobs. They and their ‘fans’ will continue the revisionist history-making to maintain their success. It has already happened here on OSNews in the linked article and thread about Samsung adding a ‘dock’ and thereby ‘copying’ Apple yet again. Seriously?!
I could write a psychological analysis on why this won’t work but I will consider that for another time.
Good chatting with you.
There is a certain catechism about Apple so-called ‘fans’ that exists on this and other forums. All I can say about that is anecdotal. What I experience in my daily work in an enterprise with 5000+ people is a healthy mix of Apple and non-Apple devices. I don’t run into many users who are sipping Steve Jobs kool aid…..they are simply using their iPads, iPhones and Macs for a variety of reasons. Same is true for the non-Apple users. I observe only a small number of ‘fans’ who see this as a platform religion….not limited to Apple device users.
Apple has a checkered history, and are ripe for critique about their practices. Only time will tell whether their ability to compete is adequate in the market, but the past 15 years have been (arguably) unparalleled in business annals. If I was a shareholder I would expect Apple to do whatever it takes to protect their intellectual property within the bounds of what the law allows. When they step over those bounds, I expect them to be slapped by the courts.
So I imagine that it will be really shocking to you learning now that OS X (also a basis for iOS) is likewise an acquired OS – as is Pixo OS, the one used in iPods (and BTW, let’s not forget the string of failures in developing a replacement for the last “really Apple” OS, the Mac OS Classic).
NVM how Apple doesn’t actually manufacture anything for quite some time…
Also, contemporary product. And you must be really one heck of an Applebot, if you think that marketing or distribution changes anything WRT the significance of a product as a demonstration of tech trends and landscape…
BTW movements of talent and technology: Apple would be utterly lost, unable to compete, without largely taking what the industry at large comes up with – in the words of the messiah (NVM “we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&feature=player_detailpag…
(ohh, but I forgot, Apple is “special” and requires different ways of looking at what they do…)
The Franklin eBookman (1999-2002) had a flat screen with a single power button along with a jog-wheel on the side. It had a grid of application icons much like today’s technology. There was also a “app store” of sorts.
Someone should make a web site with a time line showing how all of these ideas have evolved over time.
It’s nothing unusual happening here. This is the same thing as seeing patents granted which contain “innovations” that have been known for years, have been patented, but the new one has the words “on a mobile device” or “on a device with a touch screen” or an a “mobile phone with a touchscreen” etc. appended to the end of each sentence. Regarding PDAs they can defend by simply saying they were PDAs and these are touchscreen phones and whatnot. My very simple view is that if it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck…
On an unrelated note, I see “news” popping up about rumors of the new iPhone, and I’d like to add my own: they will take the GS3 hardware as it is, and install iOS on it. My, that would be a wonderful day
How can you think that the iPhone could be similar to a PDA, like (say) the iPaq. It is clearly a novel design.
just stumbled across this video of the at&t eo440:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvp-nZ-8QY4&feature=relmfu
it’s a smartphone from ’93