11 ms·

> Hmm - i really dont agree with this. Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZ

by beedogs 14y ago

> Hmm - i really dont agree with this. Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR. Apple frankly blew the industry apart. What? No, we weren't. I had a Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard) a year and a half before the iPhone was introduced and it was perfectly fine. Apple just added shiny icons and took away the keyboard and stylus. BFD.

capkutay 14y ago
Apple just added shiny icons and took away the keyboard and stylus. BFD. I actually think that is a BFD. If it had a keyboard, the whole idea of dynamic UI's would not exist. Would anyone think that angry birds is cool if we had to play it with arrow buttons on the keyboard?
- eftpotrm 14y ago
  Windows CE 'Pocket PC' handhelds had retracting soft keyboards 10+ years ago. Handspring Treos were dedicated touchscreen-based phone-PDA hybrids not much later. PalmOS had grids of icons for its screens from day one. Apple's primary innovation wasn't technical, it was marketing. They tied a few pre-existing ideas together slightly better, made them more shiny and used the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field to convince the world it was a never-before-seen quantum leap.
  - tayl0r 14y ago
    Those prior things you speak of were absolutely terrible. I had all those devices and they sucked compared to the iPhone. I think that those "innovations" seem simple now in hindsight, but why didn't any of the companies previously making smart phones or PDAs (Palm, Windows CE, HP, Compaq, Dell, etc) come up with something that not only the hardcore nerds would actually want to use? I really don't think it was just marketing. Apple made a smartphone that almost everyone could pick up and enjoy using. I definitely see both sides to this story. It sucks that Apple is killing fair (and unfair) competition but it also sucks that Samsung can just sit there and blatantly copy Apple's innovations. There needs to be a balance. This is the best quote I've seen about the verdict: "Samsung only found itself in trouble with the products that copied liberally from Apple. It did not help their case that they had a hundred page document describing what to copy nor the fact that Google went to them and said "do not copy Apple that blatantly"."
    - powertower 14y ago
      > Those prior things you speak of were absolutely terrible. I had all those devices and they sucked compared to the iPhone. One of the reasons they sucked, was because they had to... They were done 2, 5, 10, 20 years before the iPhone, iPad, etc came out... When we had CPUs, screens, drives, etc, that were inferior and could not handle the same load or work that modern hardware does.
      - gnaffle 14y ago
        No, they didn't have to. The CPU speeds, storage and screens existed years before the iPhone launched. The iPhone did have a capacitive touch screen, but that wasn't exactly new, bleeding edge technology. Three years earlier in 2005, the N770 had a bigger higher DPI screen than the iPhone, HTC had phones with the same CPU speed. But none of those devices had software specially made for finger touch with a capacitive screen. They didn't suck because the technology didn't exist, they sucked because other companies didn't see further ahead than the existing, navigation button / stylus driven interfaces that had existed for 10 years prior. If you need further proof, just look at the time it has taken Nokia, RIM and others to respond to the iPhone. It took _years_. If technology was the limiting factor, you'd think they would be just as aware of technological developments as Apple was, and have similar devices to the iPhone lined up and ready to go by 2007?
  - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
    They can't hear you. Look at the recurring pattern in this thread and elsewhere. Apple fanatic: Apple deserves a 20 year government enforced monopoly because they did it first. Everyone else stole it, and are thieves, who deserve to pay. Member of the reality-based consensus: small portable computers existed before the iPad/iPhone and every individual part that you could name (or patent) had been done before by others. Concrete factual example A, B, C... <sound of crunching mental gears and cognitive dissonance defences engaging> Apple fanatic: But Apple did it better and make more money! Therefore it doesn't matter who did it first. People who build on the innovations of others and provide them to consumers are what is important here. You could spend all day trying to get them to face up to their conflicting logic, but they'll resist with all their might.
    - nirvana 14y ago
      Yeah! There's nothing new in the iPhone, that Bell didn't demonstrate over a century ago! The reality is, you guys are ideologically driven- you want to get google off the hook for stealing Apples inventions, so you pretend like the patents cover features rather than implementations. Your dishonesty is shameful.
      - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
        Please quote, from the relevant patent, what implementation (rather than feature) you think Google and/or Samsung stole from Apple.
      - tatsuke95 14y ago
        Since this is essentially Apple vs. the rest of the industry, how can you claim those supporting the industry are the ones that are ideologically driven?
        Tycho 14y ago
        Cause Android is the rest of the industry?
  - sharjeel 14y ago
    If Windows CE had everything well before iPhone came, why didn't Microsoft patent the stuff then?
    - zerohp 14y ago
      Sensible people considered these minor features too obvious. Apples invention was the combination of many simple things into one good product, but they are protecting it by patenting all of the simple things.
      - ciniglio 14y ago
        To be clear, if this were actually the case, the $$ that Samsung spent on this suit would have clearly uncovered this as prior art.
  - gnaffle 14y ago
    Then I wonder why other companies hasn't realized this and hired the same marketing company as Apple uses? If marketing is all (or mostly all) there is, why can't other companies easily replicate Apples profit margins? Why didn't Apple just rebrand a Symbian or Maemo device and put an Apple logo on it, if marketing is the main deal? (Or better yet, why not just relaunch the Newton GUI?)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
CamperBob2 14y ago
I had a Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard) a year and a half before the iPhone was introduced and it was perfectly fine No, it was not "perfectly fine." Otherwise they would have sold a hundred million of them. Give credit where it's due, for Pete's sake. It is a fact that prior to the iPhone, cell phones sucked ass. It is also a fact that granting Apple a twenty-year legal monopoly on trivial "innovations" will hurt consumers as much as it will Apple's competitors.
- stanleydrew 14y ago
  > No, it was not "perfectly fine." Otherwise they would have sold a hundred million of them. This is a lot like saying to a friend who sees $100 on the ground that it can't really be $100, otherwise someone would have picked it up already. Apple is a marketing powerhouse. They are brilliant at it. They hook you emotionally. They convince you that they created some device specifically for you. They really make you believe that it is changing your life. That it is revolutionary. They even help you rationalize flaws. (iPhone drops cals? Oh, that's just stupid AT&T's fault.) That's how they sell 100s of millions of devices. The devices are also quite slick, but you have to concede that slickness alone is not what drives Apple's profits. The marketing budget numbers came out during this trial I believe, and they were staggering.
  - CamperBob2 14y ago
    This is a lot like saying to a friend who sees $100 on the ground that it can't really be $100, otherwise someone would have picked it up already. (Shrug) A $100 bill lying on the ground will be picked up very quickly, by the original owner if no one else. That means that if you see $100 on the ground, chances are that it's not real. It might be a $1 or $10 bill that you've mistaken at first for $100. It might be counterfeit or play money. It might be someone playing the old "glue some cash to the pavement and laugh at/film people trying to pick it up" game. The chances that someone has actually misplaced a $100 bill in public, and that you are the first to come upon it, are very low indeed. They convince you that they created some device specifically for you. I don't know about you, but if the engineers don't do their job well, the marketers have no chance of making me believe that. Otherwise my house would be full of shiny gad.... wait, uh, OK, moving on to the next point.... The marketing budget numbers came out during this trial I believe, and they were staggering. Larger than the marketing spend across the entire Android ecosystem? The fact is that there are plenty of tech companies who spend more on marketing than Apple does, and who often have better ads, as well. Each of those companies has something in common: they sell less stuff than Apple does. Therefore, your dismissal of Apple as a "marketing" company, while not necessarily wrong, must be incomplete.
veeti 14y ago
If you can not see the difference in the touchscreen UI between the Wizard (or any other pre-iPhone device) and the iPhone, you have to be blind. Until the iPhone, touch-screen phones were slow, clunky and unresponsive. They had shitty resistive screens that were a total pain to use. (LG actually released a capacitive phone before the iPhone, but the software was the same shit we had for ages so it didn't change a thing). Even simple things like lists were scrolled by aiming for a 2px wide scrollbar and dragging it. But then the iPhone came along with smooth and fluid graphics and animations, actually innovative and fun touch gestures like simple flicks to scroll through lists (and a 60fps smooth animation while doing so), pinch-to-zoom and so on. The experience was actually enjoyable. The same thing happened with the iPad. Back in the early 2000's we had "tablets" with a downsized desktop OS (Windows XP). Total shit for a touch-screen device. Even after the iPhone some competitors failed to realize what made it good. Nokia's touch screen abominations were just sad - and they're still releasing some terrible Symbian devices like the new PureView 808. The Verge's review summarizes Symbian's problems pretty well: > THE SYMBIAN EFFECT: WHEN GREAT HARDWARE IS RENDERED USELESS BY TERRIBLE SOFTWARE > Actions like scrolling or pinch-to-zoom feel like requests you’re filing with a clerk somewhere in a bureaucratic dystopia — to be carried out at some indeterminate time in the future. Completing this slow-motion train wreck is the only thing worse than unresponsive operation: a complete crash of the entire phone. Apple needs to stop with their bullshit litigation but they truly did push the industry forward with touch devices. It isn't a coincidence that touch screen phones exploded after the iPhone and that people actually started caring about tablets after the iPad.
- beedogs 14y ago
  It seems like you're walking back the claims of the guy I responded to for him: "Oh, well, okay, Apple didn't have the first touchscreen phone, but they had the first good one." Well, I don't even agree with you on that. I got five years out of my "unenjoyable" HTC smartphone. I could tether it to my laptop without forking over extra money. I could run whatever apps were available (which is more than could be said for the iPhone on launch day, because there weren't any). I had a full keyboard, a web browser that supported SSL, a music player, and Pocket PuTTY -- should I have given a shit about smooth scrolling?
magoon 14y ago
You don't really believe the HTC Wizard was "perfectly fine" do you? I went through so many Windows Mobile phones until I finally realized that the joke was on me. The user experience, the battery life, the apps, the bugs, the limitations imposed on operating system data and indeces, and the hardware were all horrific. I can't extract anything good from that experience, let alone say that any of those devices were "perfectly fine."

by beedogs 14y ago

capkutay 14y ago

Apple just added shiny icons and took away the keyboard and stylus. BFD. I actually think that is a BFD. If it had a keyboard, the whole idea of dynamic UI's would not exist. Would anyone think that angry birds is cool if we had to play it with arrow buttons on the keyboard?

eftpotrm 14y ago
Windows CE 'Pocket PC' handhelds had retracting soft keyboards 10+ years ago. Handspring Treos were dedicated touchscreen-based phone-PDA hybrids not much later. PalmOS had grids of icons for its screens from day one. Apple's primary innovation wasn't technical, it was marketing. They tied a few pre-existing ideas together slightly better, made them more shiny and used the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field to convince the world it was a never-before-seen quantum leap.
- tayl0r 14y ago
  Those prior things you speak of were absolutely terrible. I had all those devices and they sucked compared to the iPhone. I think that those "innovations" seem simple now in hindsight, but why didn't any of the companies previously making smart phones or PDAs (Palm, Windows CE, HP, Compaq, Dell, etc) come up with something that not only the hardcore nerds would actually want to use? I really don't think it was just marketing. Apple made a smartphone that almost everyone could pick up and enjoy using. I definitely see both sides to this story. It sucks that Apple is killing fair (and unfair) competition but it also sucks that Samsung can just sit there and blatantly copy Apple's innovations. There needs to be a balance. This is the best quote I've seen about the verdict: "Samsung only found itself in trouble with the products that copied liberally from Apple. It did not help their case that they had a hundred page document describing what to copy nor the fact that Google went to them and said "do not copy Apple that blatantly"."
  - powertower 14y ago
    > Those prior things you speak of were absolutely terrible. I had all those devices and they sucked compared to the iPhone. One of the reasons they sucked, was because they had to... They were done 2, 5, 10, 20 years before the iPhone, iPad, etc came out... When we had CPUs, screens, drives, etc, that were inferior and could not handle the same load or work that modern hardware does.
    - gnaffle 14y ago
      No, they didn't have to. The CPU speeds, storage and screens existed years before the iPhone launched. The iPhone did have a capacitive touch screen, but that wasn't exactly new, bleeding edge technology. Three years earlier in 2005, the N770 had a bigger higher DPI screen than the iPhone, HTC had phones with the same CPU speed. But none of those devices had software specially made for finger touch with a capacitive screen. They didn't suck because the technology didn't exist, they sucked because other companies didn't see further ahead than the existing, navigation button / stylus driven interfaces that had existed for 10 years prior. If you need further proof, just look at the time it has taken Nokia, RIM and others to respond to the iPhone. It took _years_. If technology was the limiting factor, you'd think they would be just as aware of technological developments as Apple was, and have similar devices to the iPhone lined up and ready to go by 2007?
- ZeroGravitas 14y ago
  They can't hear you. Look at the recurring pattern in this thread and elsewhere. Apple fanatic: Apple deserves a 20 year government enforced monopoly because they did it first. Everyone else stole it, and are thieves, who deserve to pay. Member of the reality-based consensus: small portable computers existed before the iPad/iPhone and every individual part that you could name (or patent) had been done before by others. Concrete factual example A, B, C... <sound of crunching mental gears and cognitive dissonance defences engaging> Apple fanatic: But Apple did it better and make more money! Therefore it doesn't matter who did it first. People who build on the innovations of others and provide them to consumers are what is important here. You could spend all day trying to get them to face up to their conflicting logic, but they'll resist with all their might.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    Yeah! There's nothing new in the iPhone, that Bell didn't demonstrate over a century ago! The reality is, you guys are ideologically driven- you want to get google off the hook for stealing Apples inventions, so you pretend like the patents cover features rather than implementations. Your dishonesty is shameful.
    - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
      Please quote, from the relevant patent, what implementation (rather than feature) you think Google and/or Samsung stole from Apple.
    - tatsuke95 14y ago
      Since this is essentially Apple vs. the rest of the industry, how can you claim those supporting the industry are the ones that are ideologically driven?
      - Tycho 14y ago
        Cause Android is the rest of the industry?
- sharjeel 14y ago
  If Windows CE had everything well before iPhone came, why didn't Microsoft patent the stuff then?
  - zerohp 14y ago
    Sensible people considered these minor features too obvious. Apples invention was the combination of many simple things into one good product, but they are protecting it by patenting all of the simple things.
    - ciniglio 14y ago
      To be clear, if this were actually the case, the $$ that Samsung spent on this suit would have clearly uncovered this as prior art.
- gnaffle 14y ago
  Then I wonder why other companies hasn't realized this and hired the same marketing company as Apple uses? If marketing is all (or mostly all) there is, why can't other companies easily replicate Apples profit margins? Why didn't Apple just rebrand a Symbian or Maemo device and put an Apple logo on it, if marketing is the main deal? (Or better yet, why not just relaunch the Newton GUI?)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

CamperBob2 14y ago

I had a Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard) a year and a half before the iPhone was introduced and it was perfectly fine No, it was not "perfectly fine." Otherwise they would have sold a hundred million of them. Give credit where it's due, for Pete's sake. It is a fact that prior to the iPhone, cell phones sucked ass. It is also a fact that granting Apple a twenty-year legal monopoly on trivial "innovations" will hurt consumers as much as it will Apple's competitors.

stanleydrew 14y ago
> No, it was not "perfectly fine." Otherwise they would have sold a hundred million of them. This is a lot like saying to a friend who sees $100 on the ground that it can't really be $100, otherwise someone would have picked it up already. Apple is a marketing powerhouse. They are brilliant at it. They hook you emotionally. They convince you that they created some device specifically for you. They really make you believe that it is changing your life. That it is revolutionary. They even help you rationalize flaws. (iPhone drops cals? Oh, that's just stupid AT&T's fault.) That's how they sell 100s of millions of devices. The devices are also quite slick, but you have to concede that slickness alone is not what drives Apple's profits. The marketing budget numbers came out during this trial I believe, and they were staggering.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  This is a lot like saying to a friend who sees $100 on the ground that it can't really be $100, otherwise someone would have picked it up already. (Shrug) A $100 bill lying on the ground will be picked up very quickly, by the original owner if no one else. That means that if you see $100 on the ground, chances are that it's not real. It might be a $1 or $10 bill that you've mistaken at first for $100. It might be counterfeit or play money. It might be someone playing the old "glue some cash to the pavement and laugh at/film people trying to pick it up" game. The chances that someone has actually misplaced a $100 bill in public, and that you are the first to come upon it, are very low indeed. They convince you that they created some device specifically for you. I don't know about you, but if the engineers don't do their job well, the marketers have no chance of making me believe that. Otherwise my house would be full of shiny gad.... wait, uh, OK, moving on to the next point.... The marketing budget numbers came out during this trial I believe, and they were staggering. Larger than the marketing spend across the entire Android ecosystem? The fact is that there are plenty of tech companies who spend more on marketing than Apple does, and who often have better ads, as well. Each of those companies has something in common: they sell less stuff than Apple does. Therefore, your dismissal of Apple as a "marketing" company, while not necessarily wrong, must be incomplete.

veeti 14y ago

If you can not see the difference in the touchscreen UI between the Wizard (or any other pre-iPhone device) and the iPhone, you have to be blind. Until the iPhone, touch-screen phones were slow, clunky and unresponsive. They had shitty resistive screens that were a total pain to use. (LG actually released a capacitive phone before the iPhone, but the software was the same shit we had for ages so it didn't change a thing). Even simple things like lists were scrolled by aiming for a 2px wide scrollbar and dragging it. But then the iPhone came along with smooth and fluid graphics and animations, actually innovative and fun touch gestures like simple flicks to scroll through lists (and a 60fps smooth animation while doing so), pinch-to-zoom and so on. The experience was actually enjoyable. The same thing happened with the iPad. Back in the early 2000's we had "tablets" with a downsized desktop OS (Windows XP). Total shit for a touch-screen device. Even after the iPhone some competitors failed to realize what made it good. Nokia's touch screen abominations were just sad - and they're still releasing some terrible Symbian devices like the new PureView 808. The Verge's review summarizes Symbian's problems pretty well: > THE SYMBIAN EFFECT: WHEN GREAT HARDWARE IS RENDERED USELESS BY TERRIBLE SOFTWARE > Actions like scrolling or pinch-to-zoom feel like requests you’re filing with a clerk somewhere in a bureaucratic dystopia — to be carried out at some indeterminate time in the future. Completing this slow-motion train wreck is the only thing worse than unresponsive operation: a complete crash of the entire phone. Apple needs to stop with their bullshit litigation but they truly did push the industry forward with touch devices. It isn't a coincidence that touch screen phones exploded after the iPhone and that people actually started caring about tablets after the iPad.

beedogs 14y ago
It seems like you're walking back the claims of the guy I responded to for him: "Oh, well, okay, Apple didn't have the first touchscreen phone, but they had the first good one." Well, I don't even agree with you on that. I got five years out of my "unenjoyable" HTC smartphone. I could tether it to my laptop without forking over extra money. I could run whatever apps were available (which is more than could be said for the iPhone on launch day, because there weren't any). I had a full keyboard, a web browser that supported SSL, a music player, and Pocket PuTTY -- should I have given a shit about smooth scrolling?

magoon 14y ago

You don't really believe the HTC Wizard was "perfectly fine" do you? I went through so many Windows Mobile phones until I finally realized that the joke was on me. The user experience, the battery life, the apps, the bugs, the limitations imposed on operating system data and indeces, and the hardware were all horrific. I can't extract anything good from that experience, let alone say that any of those devices were "perfectly fine."