![]() Technically speaking, however, the principles could theoretically extend to Apple’s new Magic Mouse and Trackpad as well. Apple and Google are now bitter smartphone rivals, so the agreement has presumably fallen apart. Patently Apple reports: Apple has been granted a crucial Multi-Touch patent relating to Master and Slave controllers used primarily in Apple’s iOS based devices. According to one rumor, Google had a gentleman’s agreement with Apple not to use multi-touch in Android, as part of a fragile partnership between the two companies. World of Apple (via MacRumors) spotted the patent, which was awarded last Tuesday to several Apple executives, including Steve Jobs, iPhone software chief Scott Forstall, and Wayne Westerman. After Palm broke the mold with the Pre, and didn’t get sued, Android followed, and multi-touch is now a standard smartphone feature. This seems kind of crazy now, but there was a time when other smartphones didn’t use multi-touch. The patent simply covers the way an iPhone can tell if you want to scroll up and down only, or side-to-side as well, based on the angle your finger hits the screen. This was once regarded as Apple’s key multi-touch patent, but as Engadget’s Nilay Patel points out in January 2009, there’s really nothing multi-touch about it. The closest Apple has come in the past is with “ Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics,” applied against both HTC and Nokia. Over the years, Apple has been granted numerous patents related to multitouch (1, 2), and has even used its ownership of those inventions to take on its rivals in court. Apple has never used these patents for lawsuits before, and from what I can tell, Apple’s lawsuits against other smartphone manufacturers, such as HTC and Nokia, don’t specifically target multi-touch. You don’t have to be a master of legal jargon to see that both patents involve touching a screen with multiple fingers at the same time. Shermans conclusion: Apple (which was granted a broad patent on multi-touch) could find itself cross-licensing with Microsoft as to avoid losing its patent. Multipoint Touchscreen: “A touch panel having a transparent capacitive sensing medium configured to detect multiple touches or near touches that occur at the same time and at distinct locations in the plane of the touch panel and to produce distinct signals representative of the location of the touches on the plane of the touch panel for each of the multiple touches is disclosed.” The Macintosh turned 25 years old this past weekend, and Apple seems to be celebrating the occasion by unleashing its blood-lusting attorneys on Palm in a potential patent infringement suit.
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