John Grubber said some really important things in his rant about this whole iPhone & HTC lawsuit. Here are some points I totally agree with:
During Jobs’s iPhone introduction keynote address in January 2007, before showing what the iPhone looked like, Jobs put up this
slide showing four of the then-leading smartphones on the market: the Motorola Q, a BlackBerry, a Palm Treo, and the Nokia E62.
Those pre-iPhone smartphones Jobs displayed all shared the same fundamental design: half-screen, half keyboard, and an up/down/left/right navigation controller. Now look at
this prototype Android phone Gizmodo spotted in December 2007 — 11 months after the iPhone introduction. Android was conceived of that same old model — the prototype Gizmodo found in December 2007 would have fit perfectly alongside the other four phones in Jobs’s keynote slide.
The iPhone introduced a new model. A true great leap forward in the state of the art. Not a small screen that shows you things which you manipulate indirectly using buttons and trackballs occupying half the device’s surface area, but instead a touchscreen that occupies almost the entirety of the surface area, showing things you manipulate directly.
Android is a far better platform today than it would have been if Apple had never created the iPhone. That, in some sense, is not fair.
That’s the nature of implementing insanely great ideas. The bar has been raised, and, yes, Apple did most of the lifting. That’s how it goes.
