iPatent
January 18th, 2007
…and boy have we patented it!…we filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone and we intend to protect them.
Steve Jobs about the new iPhone™, @Macworld 2007
Well, everybody and their little sisters are blabbering about the iPhone, so I feel obliged to take my turn to say something at least as earth-shattering.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of things have been said about the little that’s been shown. Of course I drool over the technical side of it, as much as the next geek, and maybe a little more. But I couldn’t help but find the patent reference at least worrisome.
I won’t say Apple doesn’t look like they’ve come up with yet another revolutionary piece of tech, or that they don’t deserve credit and reward for doing that. It’s a shame they think they have to rely on patents to get them, but I won’t say this is their fault, rather than a fault in the System (well… let’s put it this way). But what I think is their fault, and incredibly lame, is that they’re stressing on the patents issue like that.
Anyway, I’ve already been asked if I intend to buy the phone. The full answer is probably quite complex, for a change, and I think I’ll elaborate here sooner or later. For now, suffice to say that I’m stuck between desperately wanting a device like that and hoping that they choke themselves to oblivion with their two hundred patents shoved down their throat (and yes, I had to resist the temptation to rephrase).
Moreover, anybody remember this? Now, who’s claiming what again?
All in all, I think I can live without this ultra-cool device, playing music and videos on its (almost) widescreen display, surfing the web on WiFi, running OS X widgets, all through a touch screen interface, that also happens to be a phone…
…or can I? 
By the way, iPhone™ is a trademark of… your guess is as good as mine
UPDATE 20070119:
Looks like I’m not the only one to notice: here’s some juice and Jeff’s (very bland) remarks.
External links:
cat >/dev/null is a collection of 
Articles
January 18th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
I agree, and I don’t like patents as well, specially if we are speaking about software.
Anyway I think as well that iPhone is not mandatory, specially for computer scientists. We will always have a laptop and maybe a desktop/server with all the software we need, and a phone with few functionality, maybe the WiFi and a Linux OS is much more than enought for us (and definitely must be much smaller that the iPhone, come on no ones wants any longer those big stuff in the pocket. I think is a mistake and that device cannot replace a mobile phone but is just a palm with a phone inside. If they make it smaller they can really think to have a big market)