They may be "trying" to move away from the iPhone clone look, but even they are not doing a very good job innovation (shocker). Windows Mobile 7 (or whatever it is called now) is certainly a more subtle clone, but a clone nonetheless.
Well, here's the problem with patenting stuff like this: there's only so many ways to make a device interact with human beings. Given a screen, data to display on the screen, and processors to process the data, there are only so many ways to interface with it. There are keyboards, and mice, and pen-type devices, and now touch screens... What else is there?
Now don't get me wrong, I am *NOT* saying there's no more innovation to be done, or that Apple or some other company (or even individual) can't devise some new way of doing these things. At the same time, we have to realize that there are limits to this, at least in
broad terms. As we get more and more "big idea" ways to interact with devices (touchpad, touch screen, keyboard, etc.), there will be fewer and fewer ways to get our bodies to interact with them, and most of the innovation will be in the particulars of how these things work (multi-touch is a good example, or tapping on touchpads, etc. etc.)
There's a reason, keep in mind, why nobody - even the tremendously innovative Apple - has really changed the basic "big idea" way their computer operating systems work since, well heck - the Macintosh in the 80s! Sure, there have been more "minor" innovations and changes: the Start Menu, the Dock, etc... but ultimately, we still have a series of windows in which our applications run, and the windows have buttons to close them, to make them bigger, and to make them smaller, and we can swap between the windows somehow, and open up new programs into them somehow, and so forth.
There's just only so many ways you can make a human interface work, and that's my problem with what Apple is doing here, and with talking about "iPhone clones." Are these phones clones? Well, in the sense that they operate similarly to the iPhone, sure - but not in the sense that they're necessarily copied from Apple as if the other companies couldn't come up with something on their own. There's just only so many "big idea" ways to do an interface, and so I am firmly in the camp that this kind of corporate bickering back and forth only stifles the innovation that companies
can do in the "particulars" of how these things work.
It reminds me of when George Lucas tried to sue various movie studios for the way they depicted high speed space travel (among other things) as infringing on Star Wars. One of the things that came out of that was that, well, there's only so many ways to make a space ship look like it's going fast! So today, nobody is prevented from making their ships go fast just because Lucas wanted to have the monopoly on it. I pray these Apple suits (at least largely) turn out the same way.
