![]() In the two decades that followed, researchers experimented with a variety of techniques for building multitouch displays. Buxton reports that the screen, created by Bob Boie, "used a transparent capacitive array of touch sensors overlaid on a CRT." It allowed the user to "manipulate graphical objects with fingers with excellent response time." According to Bill Buxton, a multitouch pioneer now at Microsoft Research, the first multitouch screen was developed at Bell Labs in 1984. High-tech innovations are often developed by laboratory researchers long before they're introduced into the commercial market. ![]() Together, there's a real danger that the smartphone wars will end by stifling competition. Apple now has more powerful legal weapons at its disposal this time around, as do its competitors. Unfortunately, in the last 20 years, the courts have made it much easier to acquire software patents. Apple lost that first fight when the courts ruled key elements of the Macintosh user interface were not eligible for copyright protection. The current legal battles over smartphones are a sequel to the "look and feel" battle over the graphical user interface (GUI) in the late 1980s. The best ideas are quickly incorporated into all the leading mobile platforms. You can call this process plenty of names, some less than complimentary, but consumers generally benefit from the copying within the smartphone market. And since the release of Android, Apple has incorporated some Google ideas into iOS. It wouldn't have been possible to create the iPhone without copying the ideas of these other researchers. Innovation within multitouch and smartphone technology goes back decades-the first multitouch devices were created in the 1980s-and spans a large number of researchers and commercial firms. Rather, it represented the culmination of incremental innovation over decades-much of which occurred outside of Cupertino. The iPhone didn't emerge fully formed from Jobs's head. Jobs called Android a "stolen product," but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation. Jobs then vowed to "spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank to right this wrong." Schmidt had already been forced to resign from Apple's board, partly due to increased smartphone competition between the two companies. "I want you to stop using our ideas in Android," Jobs reportedly told Eric Schmidt, then Google's CEO. Photograph by brett jordan reader comments 664 withĪccording to his official biographer, Steve Jobs went ballistic in January 2010 when he saw HTC's newest Android phones.
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