Apple gets one-upped on homescreen contact patent

Uhhh BlackBerries have had this feature for some time now. That is, adding individual icons to the screen for individual contacts.

I'm confused ... One of the first apps I installed on my iphone was fscecall which lets me add a button with a photo of any contact which when pressed dials the persons number

Why would somebody want to call a person who's near? And how would the iPhone detect proximity? Not all contacts have an iPhone / address / ...

I'm not really sure why something like should be allowed to be pattented in the first place. it's not a "new technology" It's just an idea that ANYONE can come up with and impliment.

It's like a vehicle manufacturer patenting a power window...

In this day and age, there are too many products trying to be the ONLY one that is allowed to do something very basic, that i think everyone deserves in whatever product they have! It's rediculous!

The patent was filed in July of 2008. That's over 1.5 years ago and not last week.

People open web stores every day where you can buy and download software so it's not exactly an original idea that Microsoft came up with. People were selling software before Microsoft even existed. They just happened to be selling it in brick and mortar stores. Product distribution evolves just as Graphical User Interfaces do.

Nokia smartphones have had contact photos on the homescreen for ages, too! e.g. my aging Nokia 5800XM touchscreen, contact photos on home screen, automatically shows recent to-and-fro texts, calls and rss feeds (not just limited to twit/fb), all built-in, no need to buy an app :)

The FaceCall app kinda does the same thing, doesn't it?

"Your Icon Here" from myCon does the same, except for emailing.

There is an app called Contact which puts an icon of someone in your address book on your screen for easy dialing or emailing. Very helpful and worth the money.

Read the patent. Why do we have to put up with blogs writing complete BS without checking any facts? I expected more from TUAW.

The patent was filed in July of 2008. That's over 1.5 years ago. Since nobody files a patent the day they came up with the idea, it's not unreasonable to think that Apple has documentation (sketches, journal notes, napkins, whatever) that date back at least a few months (maybe 2 to 6) prior to the filing.

Like all software patents it's a defensive one. Apple's patents nearly all are. Software patents are usually for things that can be classified as insanely derivative and the majority of patents have some form of reference to prior art.

In this specific case it looks like Apple's patent came before anything from Google. And even in the US, it's not who had the idea first that matters. You have up to one year to file a patent after documenting the idea and publicly discussing or showing it in a product. IMO, not only that stipulation should be removed, but software patents themselves should be completely abolished. They serve only to harm competition and the marketplace. We already have copyright law to protect source code and design. That's enough for software.

If you have an idea, documented or not, and you don't file a patent, you're SOL. However, if you have made that idea public, that can also be enough to invalidate someone else's patent. It's no good for seeking any damages, but it means the patent applicant can't obtain an exclusive lock on the concept.

If I had a nickle for every idea I had that someone patented years later, I'd probably have at least a couple of bucks. Including ideas that were even demonstrated publicly that could likely be used to overturn some existing patents. I'd only bother if it were something I was going to develop, then you bet your ass I'd bring it all up to get any of the existing patents out of my way.