Smartphone and Cellphone Wars

[Monseratto]

They are the same copy-cats that Samsung is. With Motorola mobile now under google they are seeking to ban the iPhone, iPad, and Macs in the US.

Nokia Symbian Icons



IOS vs Android TouchWiz

One notable irony of Apple's fortress-of-patents strategy is that the company's own signature innovation was quite possibly based on theft. That's the graphical display feature of its pioneering Macintosh computer. The originator of the graphical display was Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, which in 1979 gave Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the design team of Apple's Lisa computer, the Mac's precursor, a super-secret demonstration of the technology.

Dazzled by the screen display he saw at PARC, Jobs ordered the designers to put something just like it into the Lisa, and subsequently the Mac. That didn't stop Jobs from suing Microsoft in 1988 for allegedly poaching the Mac interface to create Windows. But it did elicit this classic comeback from Bill Gates, published in a trade magazine in 1989: "Steve, just because you broke into Xerox's house before I did and took the TV doesn't mean I can't go in later and take the stereo."

Plainly, if software had been judged patentable in 1979 and Xerox had taken the aggressive approach common today, it could have blasted Apple into the asteroid belt. Jobs wouldn't be a lionized figure today, but a tech industry footnote.

For example, Windows users have had icons on their desktops arranged neatly in a grid, since long before iOS came around. I've owned several pre-iPhone mobiles that did the same. Nokia's Symbian s60 for example. It might not have been exactly the same, but a grid, with icons, nonetheless. In fact, pre-Android and iOS, most mobile phones often looked and operated in much the same way, the difference was mainly in the hardware itself. Apple (and to be fair, it's not alone) has ushered in a new era though, where minute details, that really aren't new innovations, are being patented. More frustratingly, the patents are being granted. And this is where I feel the real problem lies. Apple had the legal right to protect something, it did, and won. Fine. What is more galling is that the jurors seem to have missed an opportunity to question the validity (and by proxy, value) of these patents, and they didn't. They handed Apple the right to romp ever forward down this self-destructive path, the end of which is good for no one. Not even Apple. Don't let it become Appl€?