Complete nonsense, pinch to zoom is the most practical and logical method of employing zoom on a mobile device. The fact that it is something that is there is a patent for is scary. This entire case was nonsensical at best.
Yes, it is the most logical, given the existence of multi-touch displays, once you've seen it done.
Before that, user interfaces used +/- buttons, or a small representation of the full view with a panning rectangle in it that would control what portion of the zoomed in view you would see, or there was a fish-eye zoom right in the full view that could show more data. Many ways of accomplishing zoom, that were not pinch to zoom.
Users are notoriously afraid to try right clicking, or any other kind of interaction that's unguided, since they're afraid to mess things up. So hardware zoom buttons, or on-screen zoom buttons were more user friendly.Think of how many digital cameras use the lens zoom controls for zooming in and out, and the menu arrow buttons for panning the zoom. The same thing in DVD players.
But once Apple aired TV commercials, and had animations on their website, showing pinch to zoom on their devices, it became the obviously best way to go. Because it had been demonstrated in a mass fashion. Which cost them money. To say that a gesture is intuitive, is really circular reasoning, because you have to accept that gestures at all are intuitive, which they're not, because people don't want to randomly touch at something on the screen. They either won't think to, or are worried of ill effects. Just the other day so many people thought that picture downloading in the Facebook app wasn't available, but you had to touch and continue holding. In retrospect, maybe an obvious gesture, but not initially.
Never mind the technical issues of implementing multi-touch gestures. How does the system differentiate between a touch to click a link, and a touch to pan the view, or a touch that highlights text to copy? How does it differentiate between two clicks and two fingers touching the display, given that you'll never touch both fingers at exactly the same time. All of these things require thought, experimentation, and tuning. Just because it's easy for your finger to pinch to zoom doesn't mean it's trivial for the system to handle that occurence, which is likely how you developed the misconception of triviality.
It would be nice, as a consumer and tech user, for all ideas to enter into the commons, and the best ideas disseminate as rapidly as possible. But it takes many man-years to make complex software systems now a days, and hundreds of millions of dollars in capital costs to globally launch these hardware devices, with the logistics of part procurement, assembly, shipping, stocking, marketing, etc., so I can see why device manufacturers need patents. It's a balancing act between different stake holders getting what they need, to continue to survive.
