HTC Hits Apple with Patent Lawsuit Targeting Mac and iOS Devices

[samcraig]

I don't "research" apps on the phone itself. I dislike the appstore interface and it takes too long to go back and forth between pages. Now - I do research and compare apps on my macbook pro or iMac and then go to my phone once I've determined which app I want and download direct.

I don't claim to have an answer or solution - but Apple's appstore app isn't a joy to use unless you know exactly what app you want.

 

[sentinelsx]

I don't think you got what I was saying, a blackberry is a smartphone, an iPhone is a smartphone, Windows phones are a smart phone. There is a broad spectrum to what is considered a smartphone and MANY phone fall under it. I was referring to the other poster saying that the iPhone wasn't a smart phone because it didn't have an appstore or sdk, which is false. The first smartphones didn't have an app store either but they were still smart phones.

Ah, okay. Well I wasn't replying to that point. My apologies. I still think it was a smartphone back then, just a very restricted one (pretty much same today but has more features).

 

[cwwilson]

My dad can beat up your dad......

FIFY.

Anyway can everyone just stop this pissing contest and move on to I don't know...making good products?

 

[organerito]

Sorry smarty, the cell phone patent expired years ago.

The only INNOVATION in this industry comes from Apple. All anyone else does is make "me too" products. Can't wait to see what the iPhone 5 has... so we know what we can expect HTC, Samsung and all the other "me too" companies to roll out 1-2 years later.

if you want to give a serious argument, you have to have a a coherent logic, which you don't have at all.

 

[sentinelsx]

Eh? On the iPhone there is an app for the appstore. No need to "struggle" with the web.



What would that be for?? Seriously who uses iTunes on their mac/PC to download apps?

Anyone???

Me.

Squinting eyes on small screen to read description is not my thing. Not to mention the screen caps have misled me a few times and iTunes (no matter how much I hate it) shows far more details for me to decide.

Also browsing on a 17in screen > browsing info on a 3.5in screen (or 4 in, 4,3 in, 5 in whatever those droids come up with). I still use my PC a lot. I wish someone came up with a holographic projector for the small devices to project info onto a bigger area. Small screens are not my thing for most of the computing.

 

[dtaylor322]

Write Congress

I would encourage everyone to write their representatives with these examples and ask them to please overhaul the U.S. patent system.

We are constantly reading about patent lawsuits on this site. If you take the time to look at the patents at the center of these million and billion dollar battles, you will find that they are not ideas deserving of patent protection. They are typically simple ideas that any engineer in the field could and would have come up with, or worse, they are clearly based on prior and existing art.

This rank abuse of the patent system costs the consumer, both in higher product prices and in the stifling of innovation. All of the companies involved are guilty of this, including Apple. But it's especially heinous when we read about companies of lawyers who do nothing in the world but buy these ridiculous patents and then try to sue hard working people who actually deliver products and services (i.e. the recent patent spat involving app developers).

It has to end. The U.S. patent office isn't even bothering to review patents any more before granting them. I swear if someone was clever enough they could probably get the U.S. to grant them patents covering bodily functions. It is killing industry and innovation and enriching fat cat lawyers who do nothing for the world.

Every time you see a story like this, take the 5 minutes you would have spent commenting and instead write Congress. Maybe they will get the hint.

 

[edoates]

This is going too far. Very bad for consumers, stopping innovation and new products from entering the market. Whoever sells the best product should have the biggest market share, not the one who stops others from being able to sell their own product and compete. The only reason these companies are suing each other, at least in my eyes, is the fear that the other products are better.

Please stop.

Well, yes and no.

If you spend a bunch of time an money creating something new and unique, take the time to produce it, and it becomes a success, it's really annoying to have someone else just copy it, bypassing the work, time, and expense of creating it in the first place. Their costs are lower because they don't have to amortize that development cost.

On the other hand, so many of these patents are for small, duplicative, or even false claims of "invention" that the whole patent process is being abused.

Sign of the times, I suppose.

 

[PlipPlop]

Innovation. That's why Apple invented a slide down notification system, Twitter integration, and OTA updates.


Oh, wait.....

Didnt Apple copy the open Applications from the lock menu too? I love that features on my Sensation

 

[thunderclap]

I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned this yet, but there was a great episode of This American Life that focused on technology patent law. It's worth your hour to listen to it. If interested, it's available here.

 

[kdarling]

Ah, okay. Well I wasn't replying to that point. My apologies. I still think it was a smartphone back then, just a very restricted one (pretty much same today but has more features).

At its debut, the first iPhone was more what is usually called a featurephone -- coming with an unchangeable set of apps from the manufacturer.

 

[AppleScruff1]

Don't forget Al Gore for inventing the Internet!!!!!

Sorry, couldn't resist! Everyone just seemed to be in the pointless arguing mode. So, I thought I would join in.

I can't believe we forgot about Gore. It really is all his fault starting the day he flipped that big switch and turned on the internet.

I hang out here because I own a Macbook Air that I like and an iPhone also. I dabble in XCode and Mac/iOS programming and love reading about new Apple products.

It doesn't mean that I don't realise that Apple are sometimes hypocrites, that they are also guilty of copying other features from other vendors and that they cross the line in some of their agreements and are litigious beyond reason.

I'm an Apple user, not an Apple devotee. I don't have to love or like 100% of what they do to like some of it and have my place on a forum dedicated to their products.

Well said. And you are a clear example of an open minded Apple user. This forum appears to be largely populated with Apple devotees, which is a kind term for fanatic.

You mean everything the Android already has?!

Shh. That won't make you popular here. Many here think that Steve invented fire and the wheel.

"Apple has all the right to protect its work".

HTC sues....."lalalalalalalala no HTC doesn't have any right to protect their work I don't believe they even have any I think they should just lie down and take it by Apple.....blah blah".

Just summed up the Apple die-hards for you folks.

An accurate summary too. Quite sad that so many allow their minds to be manipulated so easily.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)



Question: why are you here besides to troll? I never said it was innovative, and I honestly don't care if Android had it first. If you really think it's THAT important to scream "I'm #1!", then woop-de-doo.

What you have described is exactly what 90% of the users here do, scream Apple is #1.

 

[derekamoss]

At its debut, the first iPhone was more what is usually called a featurephone -- coming with an unchangeable set of apps from the manufacturer.

At it's debut, the first blackberry came with an unchangeable set of apps from the manufacturer and I'm pretty sure everyone called blackberrys smart phones. Feature phone is actually a name I haven't even heard of until today.

 

[hchung]

So I while can't vouch for the validity of the 2nd and 3rd patents because I'm not familiar with the history of OFDM, but it feels like they're probably valid patents to me. On the other hand, this then brings into question who HTC should be suing with those two patents.

They're both related to OFDM implementations, which is regarding the 3G radio communications. And we better all know that both HTC and Apple DOESN'T MAKE CELL RADIO CHIPSETS. They buy from Qualcomm, Infineon, or other companies who do. So can you get sued for using a 3rd party component that infringes?

Simply put, if you make and sell cars which include a 3G phone, can you be sued for selling said car?

As for the other patent (7,765,414), that one's pretty lame. I'm sure Palm, Apple, AT&T, Sony, and many other companies can easily pull out an proto from 1990s, maybe even 1980s, where you have a computer, a modem, and the computer can tell the modem over a 2nd serial port to sleep or ask for how much power it has left.

By the way, all you guys talking about OTA OS updates on both the fandroid and Apple fanboi camps should stop fighting because both camps lose. OTA OS updates over IP for feature phones have been around from at least 2005/2006 on Sprint. OTA OS updates over proprietary and simpler protocols predates that (simply because IP is more complex).

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

There are MacHeads older than most on these forums that say it's been happening since 2001.

Well I was drinking Koolaid directly from the source for 4 years had no choice

 

[Bisonman]

Like little girls...LOL

Now now girls! You're both pretty

 

[FakeWozniak]

Apple has patents covering [two of these patents] for both the Mac and iOS devices.

I generally agree with your post, but doubt your one point above.

Got any references on this?

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Now now girls! You're both pretty

Exactly why I have an HTC in my Pocket and a Mac on my lap

 

[kdarling]

At it's debut, the first blackberry came with an unchangeable set of apps from the manufacturer and I'm pretty sure everyone called blackberrys smart phones.

The original Blackberrys were basically two-way pagers. The first models with voice phone capabilities also allowed custom J2ME apps.

Feature phone is actually a name I haven't even heard of until today.

It's been a fairly common term in the industry, albeit with a couple of different meanings. Some use it for dumbphones that can run J2ME or BREW apps. Others use it for smartphones that are limited to a hardcoded set of apps.

A good example was the Samsung Instinct, which came out on Sprint to combat the iPhone. As with the iPhone, it was limited to the apps that came with it.

They're both related to OFDM implementations, which is regarding the 3G radio communications. And we better all know that both HTC and Apple DOESN'T MAKE CELL RADIO CHIPSETS. They buy from Qualcomm, Infineon, or other companies who do. So can you get sued for using a 3rd party component that infringes?

It's kind of like buying all the parts that make up an iPod touch. Just because you paid for them, you still don't have the right to build the iPod. You'd have to license the design and code from Apple.

A radio chip alone is useless. It also needs surrounding circuitry and baseband code, which might need to be licensed. Modern chips also have many possible modes, so you generally don't pay ahead of time for all of them. Instead, you license what you use.

For instance, the radio chip in the CDMA Verizon iPhone can also do GSM (if you add more parts and code). Do you think Apple wants the cost of a GSM license automatically included for those phones? No way. They buy only the CDMA license because that's all they use.

Another example would be building a telemetry station from raw GSM chips. If all you use is GPRS, that might even be included in the chip. If you want to legally use 3G, you'll probably need a separate license.

 

[divinox]

I agree and disagree.

I do think companies should be able to defend their IP. It's what the patent system is for. It's not a free for all and everyone should be able to take what they want and ignore the inventor. If you truly invent something, you should be able to protect it and keep it to yourself if you want.

But, it seems like the root of the problem is that many of these patents are very broad and very weak. On all sides.

The way I see this is the industry is flushing itself out. Everyone is guilty. There is no innocent party here. It seems as though the industry is in a free for all and sue me later sort of state. But, hopefully it will cause everything to get flushed out and then they can all move on.

The way the (american) system is theres no other way to play it. If the patent office made sure that only legit patents passed, people would pay up as soon as they found out they were infringing (or change the way they are doing things, and thus not infringe anymore). Now what are they gonna do? Even if they try to figure out if ("if", what a joke) they are infringing (which probably costs alot), patents are so broad (plus not proven valid) that it would just mean that they threw a bunch of cash down the drain and ended up no wiser.

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I don't get it.... don't you think the company that totally changed the smart phone market has the right to try and protect what they invented?

As do these other companies too. But it's all just business. Sure, Apple, Google, Moto, Samsung and others all want to be the smart phone king of the hill... it's called business... it's what they do.... but they are not plotting against humanity... they are only playing the current business game.

Enjoy the products and watch the show. Who knows... you might learn something. We are seeing major changes in technology and business practices. Might as well learn something.

Do you think only one company should be allowed to make Cars? Cameras? Burgers? What-nots? Making a similar device is not stealing. Its called competition.

And no, i dont think Apple should have exclusive rights to smartphones because they popularized them. Why the hell should i?

---

On topic: Change patent life to 6 months and problem solved. Longer than that is silly in an industry that moves as fast as this one.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

The original Blackberrys were basically two-way pagers. The first models with voice phone capabilities also allowed custom J2ME apps.



It's been a fairly common term in the industry, albeit with a couple of different meanings. Some use it for dumbphones that can run J2ME or BREW apps. Others use it for smartphones that are limited to a hardcoded set of apps.

A good example was the Samsung Instinct, which came out on Sprint to combat the iPhone. As with the iPhone, it was limited to the apps that came with it.



It's kind of like buying all the parts that make up an iPod touch. Just because you paid for them, you still don't have the right to build the iPod. You'd have to license the design and code from Apple.

A radio chip alone is useless. It also needs surrounding circuitry and baseband code, which might need to be licensed. Modern chips also have many possible modes, so you generally don't pay ahead of time for all of them. Instead, you license what you use.

For instance, the radio chip in the CDMA Verizon iPhone can also do GSM (if you add more parts and code). Do you think Apple wants the cost of a GSM license automatically included for those phones? No way. They buy only the CDMA license because that's all they use.

Another example would be building a telemetry station from raw GSM chips. If all you use is GPRS, that might even be included in the chip. If you want to legally use 3G, you'll probably need a separate license.

They use Qualcomm's basebannd code. They don't just stamp a chip on a board and call it a day, Thanks Qualcomm! The entire circuitry is licensed before a single board is stamped. Apple's licensing of Nokia's GSM/3G patents has already been addressed.

 

[DanteMann]

I completely agree with the whole "patent lawsuits stifle innovation", until I saw a Samsung phone and an LG phone the other day the look almost identical to the iphone 3 in form factor. A coworker with the iphone and the guy who owns the samsung swapped phones and had to dial their own numbers later on to get their phones back.

In my eyes, SOME of these patent lawsuits combat the lack of innovation rather.

It has gone out of hand though...

They must not know how to read. You know that big Samsung name on the screen? But even if they were illiterate, how about the fact that the Samsung has a bigger screen, or the fact they have different OSs on the screen, or that the Samsung has a much brighter, vivid, sharper screen. How about the wallpaper? Your either lying about the incident, or your co workers are dumb beyond belief. Seriously now.

 

[divinox]

Didn't Apple had voice control and notifications before Android even existed?

One can use the same argument for pretty much anything being "invented" today. See e.g. "the long nose of innovation".

----------

Notifications (Android)
OTA updates (Android)
iMessage (Blackberry)
Volume as camera button (WP7 and tons of others, heck my SE phone from 2005 had that...).
Voice Control (Any old phone. Appeared on my T610 or my w810 first, don't remember which).
There's a few more.

Don't believe me all you want, Apple does the same amount of "copying" that others do.

My, now ancient, T18 had it, and that was far from the first Ericsson device to have this feature. Not sure when OTA became standard, but i know that devices had it years before Android. Heck, afaik the very w810 you used to own had it.

(id also go as far as to state that notifications is dead old, even though "what we are notified of", and "how we are notified" may have changed over the years).

----------

Oh, really? BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian? Those were all smart phones.



Listen here buddy, don't go around talking like you know about my financial situation. I have an Android. I can afford an iPhone. I can go out and buy one for the full unsubsidized price right now if I wanted to. I don't want to. I choose to have Android. It's just a fact, now get your facts straight.

Dont forget about NTT DOCOMO and the i-Mode, them Japanese actually managed to do what everyone else failed with - Step out of the provider-closet and capitalize on 3G.

Everyone interested in these things should read up on it. They had like a 40% share (close to 50 million) of Japanese users. 40% of the population that is. Then again, Japan is Japan :- )

p.s.

As for "being able to afford an iphone" i saw an article some time ago stating that android users in general are richer than iphone users. might have been bogus, i never really looked in to it, but it wouldnt surprise me either. A (real) rich man once said that become rich is less about income and more about expenditures. Couldnt have said it better myself :- )

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Yeah, no kidding. Isn't the Samsung Galaxy II somewhere north of $500? That's what an unsubsidized iPhone goes for.

Closer to 1k where i'm at. Doesnt stop people from buying them.

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Its smacks desperation.

"Notification looks and behaves" isn't the same as pixel for pixel.

OTA updates just fits in with the iCloud route they are going. Makes sense. I'm sure they didn't look at android and think "thats a good idea".

People criticize apple a lot and its users but if that site represents Android and their users i feel really embarrassed for them.

If so, all of Apples complaints of being copied smacks desperation.

p.s. wp7 used cloud storage since day one (in Apple-time that is since iPhone 4).

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i can see notifications because they look alike but OTA is not a copy. thats not a feature that only android had. blackberry has it and i believe someone e-mailed steve a while ago and he said looking into it or something. iMessage. im kind of with you half and half but leaning towards they used the idea because apple knew that was what was keeping blackberry users over there. and the camera button. that is not a copy because users asked for it. there were so many threads about that and i know i submitted the request once or twice.

if we continue to use copy then technically everybody copied whoever first put a browser, email, media player, and all that on a phone. a copy should be something that looks similar or identical to another product or feature. not because they are the same type of idea. apples way of implementing things are different from blackberry and different from android even though they use similar features. and yes there are some features on apple products that look fairly similar to competitor products so they are not in the right. im not calling you out by the way. im just saying if we keep saying copied then everybody technically copied everyone. a copy is those stupid chinese knockoff tablets or how the first galaxy s phone looked a morphed 3gs and iPhone 4, or apples notification system to androids.

I have many consumers that are asking for an iphone that sells at half the price. So i can provide them that by selling them iphone-copies without copying, right? Copying is copying regardless of why you are copying. Should Apple provide features their consumers are asking for? Of course! But the same can be said for all providers, not just Apple. Its the double-standard that makes it funny, nothing else.

Copying is an essential and natural part of competition. Heck, the entire concept of first-mover advantage is based on this very notion (and this is one of few prime business concepts worth mentioning in the end).

P.S.

to me the first galaxy looks a bit like this... (from 2006)

...seriously though, i still think they crossed the line with that. had they not, i might have ended up buying one. besides that it was a really nice device.

----------

Hey man, I'm just comparing what you said to that crappy link.

They also talk about twitter integration, comparing it being built in to the OS (apple) and it being available on 3rd party apps (android).

Come on, thats desperate!

Correct me if i am wrong, but MSFT announced twitter integration before Apple did (along with facebook integration, skype integration, office integration etc).

 

[winston1236]

a new lawsuit every week, lawyers are getting rich off of these phone its like a new business model. create and sue, create and sue

 

[divinox]

Yep, everyone in the industry does it. It's called "Standing on the shoulders of giants". Even Apple does it.

But you know what ? Only Apple plays victim because of it and that's where people call them out on it. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Apple didn't call everyone else "copycats" while also copying their competition's feature sets.

Hey, at least they can confidently say "at the end of the day, we changed the game". That they changed it to the worse, well... thats a different story.

----------

haha. Nah, i'm not mad. Pushing stuff to all devices isn't new either and i'm confident android didn't come up with it.

I'm not sure what browsing the Android store is like on the phone but on the iPhone its perfect so non issue there.

maybe its just me but being away from my phone, i never felt the need to download an app for later. I can't speak for everyone of course.

Say your on a page like macrumors. Theres a post about this neat app. that was just launched. Now would you rather:

a) click a link on the page, using whatever device you might be on, or
b) pick up your phone, open the app store, enter the name, locate the app, press a button etc.

I dont know about you, but i surely prefer option a.

With matters of filtering being the #1 problem to solve the a approach opens up way more options when it comes to finding what you want (and getting it to your device without hassle. simple as that).

Who is most everyone in the industry? I have never even heard of a feature phone, but I have heard of a smartphone broadly thrown around, so yes, the iPhone was a smartphone.

Here is one, to start:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/the-iphone-is-not-a-smartphone/

So I while can't vouch for the validity of the 2nd and 3rd patents because I'm not familiar with the history of OFDM, but it feels like they're probably valid patents to me. On the other hand, this then brings into question who HTC should be suing with those two patents.

They're both related to OFDM implementations, which is regarding the 3G radio communications. And we better all know that both HTC and Apple DOESN'T MAKE CELL RADIO CHIPSETS. They buy from Qualcomm, Infineon, or other companies who do. So can you get sued for using a 3rd party component that infringes?

Simply put, if you make and sell cars which include a 3G phone, can you be sued for selling said car?

As for the other patent (7,765,414), that one's pretty lame. I'm sure Palm, Apple, AT&T, Sony, and many other companies can easily pull out an proto from 1990s, maybe even 1980s, where you have a computer, a modem, and the computer can tell the modem over a 2nd serial port to sleep or ask for how much power it has left.

By the way, all you guys talking about OTA OS updates on both the fandroid and Apple fanboi camps should stop fighting because both camps lose. OTA OS updates over IP for feature phones have been around from at least 2005/2006 on Sprint. OTA OS updates over proprietary and simpler protocols predates that (simply because IP is more complex).

Put it this way. If a company named Sungsam buys all devices Samsung sells (and does so in a country with like 0 ip law), are they then homefree?

(The above post was in no way intended to imply that Samsung is stealing IP. Feel free to replace Sungsam with Elppa, and Samsung with Apple).

 

[divinox]

delete