Apple has been awarded a patent for its iPhone multi-touch technology. For most people it was just a formality, but let's get the facts straight anyway.
First of all, let's just start with saying that Apple's iPhone multi-touch patent is a formality. Like most of you know, a patent is required to protect an invention from being commercially exploited by competitors. In some cases, patented technology can be used under a license agreement, and in others, the inventors might not have any interest of spreading the technology around. Apple, which is constantly growing its distribution network for the iPhone, is likely of the latter kind. Why should they license their invention to others, if they already have a successful end-user product?
As for Apple's iPhone multi-touch patent specifically, it simply describes what makes the iPhone unique. Currently, we don't know whether the upcoming Palm Pre will actually offer something that violates Apple's patent. But we all remember Palm loosing another gesture battle back in the old days, when Xerox sued Palmsource for the way Graffiti worked. Graffiti 2 was eventually rolled out, based on CIC's Jot handwriting recognition software.
Gizmodo describes the "issues" between Apple and Palm as a "nuclear war", while Engadget talks about "two large companies, each loaded up with tons of patents and pending patents". Honestly, we can't think of a single Palm patent at the time of writing that is crucial to smartphones, and if there should be a "nuclear war", we think there'll only be one winner: Apple.
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