If it included new inventions, of course they should be protectable. But the iPhone was almost entirely a consumer refinement of many already known or used features.
- It was not the first all touch smartphone. The first smartphone in the world, the 1993-4 Simon, was that.
- Although it was the first consumer phone with multi-touch capacitive touch, it was not the first announced or shown as a prototype. In fact, by 2006 analysts were predicting that capacitive screens would take off in 2007 and replace resistive.
- It was not the first to use orientation sensors to flip between portrait and landscape.
- It was not the first mobile device to have an icon grid, or flat screen, or slide-to-unlock, or flick scrolling, or green phone icons, microphone images or any of that other UI stuff that those ignorant of history tend to bring up.
- It was certainly not the first to have Google Maps, app stores, search and so forth. In fact, it was missing major common items at first like MMS, a video cam, and third party SDK.
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Even the looks were not new. By 2006, there was a nice subset of devices that were heading towards large touchscreens on a rounded rectangle body. For small example:
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Heck, at the time that the first iPhone went on sale in summer 2007, Toshiba was selling the world's first "retina" (print quality) smartphone with >300 DPI WVGA screen and fingerprint sensor... things Apple didn't have until years later.
By the way, notice a couple of interesting items there. One is this mid-2006 Samsung touch oriented phone that came out a half year before Apple demo'd their partly working iPhone prototype:
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Of more interest in relation to the California trial, are these images of phones that Samsung was working on:
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Apple's lawyers were so hot to claim that Samsung had copied the iPhone shape, that they accidentally included the Samsung F700... well known to have been in development beforehand... in their list of infringing devices.
Of course, then Apple's lawyers made sure that the jury never saw the image above. Instead the jury only saw Apple's infamous cherry-picked poster of "Samsung before and after" that I'm sure you know so well.
Apple's lawyers made sure that Samsung's 2006 prototype Ireen UI design was banned as evidence, too. After all, what would a jury think if it had seen this image:
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It's also interesting to note that it's well known that in mid 2005, Apple was still using iPods as "iPhone" UI test mules. They even filed for a patent on an iPod phone, which Jobs later mocked as form of self-protection.
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What most people do NOT know, is that a Korean smartphone maker came out in 2005 with a device that looked remarkably like the half-decade later iPhone 4... and much like the phone prototype later shown to the jury by Apple.
Spookily, Unwired magazine in 2005 accurately predicted that Apple might use a similar design.
With prior art like that, it's small wonder that Apple's lawyers also got the Pidion banned from the Koh trial. Good idea, since when the Pidion was later displayed to EU courts, Apple lost their "we invented the iPhone shape" trials every time.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Most consumers have little to no idea of smartphones and ideas that came before Apple decided to take advantage of the world market and infrastructure that so many other companies had spent years and billions creating.
The reason Apple "up-ended" things, was because they were brand new to smartphones and thus had no legacy button devices to stay compatible with. This allowed them to go straight to an all touch device. (Of course later on, Apple got stuck with small screens for a while because of similar legacy issues, but they pushed through that after a few years.)
