The last year has seen a large amount of legal rangling between mobile vendors, more specifically between Apple and everyone else. It seems that according to Apple, they are the only company that can conceive of iPhone- and iPad-type technology. Not withstanding of course the massive amount of prior art that’s out there ( CrunchPad anyone? ). This article shows that given a project, 2 ( or more ) separate project teams can/may come up with similar/same designs. There’s a certain obviousness to this stuff. For example, what use would a round tablet be? Rectangular is the obvious form-factor …
This article also shows how far removed from reality Apple is moving. A reality that may end up biting Apple. They’ve just lost a German legal case brought by Motorola and subsequently have all their products banned in the EU.
Apple is also not above trying to manipulate internet standards using patents ( similar to what Microsoft did with IE in the early 20000’s ). They’ve done this on a couple of occasions previously and are starting another chapter by purporting to own patents/patent applications that cover internet technologies.
What it all comes down to is greedy corporates using a broken patent system to make even more money than they already are. A $billion profit is not enough …
UPDATE: further news of Apple’s patent war comes in the form of a transfer of patents to a known patent troll ( other than Apple and Microsoft ).