Full FeedDid Apple just steal Palm Pre’s lunch?
Uh-oh. Things were going so well for the new Palm Pre, then Apple has to pull some patent pranks. It seems Apple was just awarded the “iPhone Patent” a whopping 358 page document that covers awesome things that make the iPhone, well, awesome. A couple chapters seem to take aim at the Pre’s advanced techniques and that could spell trouble.
Multi-touch is the first thing that comes to mind. Palm showed off how, just like the iPhone, the Pre can use multi-touch to control zoom functions. Apple’s patent covers multi-touch:
...A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command..
Another potential problem for Palm is the gestures. One of the things I thought was really clever and helpful was the gestures you could create below the screen. Seems like Apple locked that up too covering non-visual touchscreen gesture inputs.
This patent isn’t particularly good news for the Pre or for Palm. The businessman in me says Palm considered these pending patents when creating the Pre, so I will hold out hope that they’ve got a work around or enough money in the bank to push off a protracted legal battle until well after it doesn’t matter any more.
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I’m going to go ahead and patent QWERTY buttons sitting on top of a touch screen. Is that cool with everyone? OK, great.
This is absurd. Someone has to pull prior-art on Apple with this one. Patenting multi-touch is not going to fly. Think of all of the patents companies like Microsoft have with the Surface, Intel probably has, etc.
We’ll see where this one goes…
on January 27, 2009 at 11:57 AM - LINK” applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device…” This sounds like anybody with a gesture system (HTC’s TouchFlo) would be in violation… also is is tapping the X in a window on a touch screen device going to be in violation of this patent? I could see (reluctantly) multitouch but my reading is this goes way beyond that… their patent seems to claim single finger/contact commands as well.
on January 27, 2009 at 01:48 PM - LINKI remember being able to do “swipe gestures” on varying Palm pilots using a stylus. That’s before Apple released the iPhone by a good decade, at least.
on January 28, 2009 at 11:49 PM - LINKThe patent office should not allow patents for things that are so obvious & self evident. If a motion or action is something people do in the physical world to achieve some desired result, it should not be patentable to prevent use of those same motions or actions for virtual world manipulation.
on February 8, 2009 at 12:42 PM - LINKIf I want to stretch something (like pizza dough), I pull on it in more than one location…. um, I guess I “multi-touch” my pizza dough.
If I want to move something quickly, I drag it quickly… it’s physics that keep it going after I let go (not something that apple invented).
Patenting the obvious, thank’s patent office.