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Mar 06
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Apple filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against HTC this week in an indirect attack against Google’s Android platform.
That got us to wondering: If Apple wins this lawsuit, just what would a Google phone, such as the HTC-built Nexus One, look like?
Realistically, Apple and HTC are going to reach a settlement outside of court, and the impacts on actual hardware are unpredictable. But we thought that rather than barrage you with boring patents to explain the suit, we’d illustrate the suit’s potential implications by describing a Google phone in the hypothetical situation where Apple won — a phone stripped of every feature that Apple’s patents lay claim to.
The patents listed in Apple’s complaints are related to touchscreens, multitouch gestures, graphical user interfaces, signal processing and other technologies Apple pioneered for the iPhone. Here’s a hint: If Apple had its way, a Google phone wouldn’t be pretty.
(A hat tip to Engadget’s Nilay Patel, a former attorney, for his fantastic work rounding up and explaining the patents to help guide our analysis.)
Out of the 20 patents in question, there are a few that stand out as the most noteworthy: Patents related to the way icons automatically rearrange themselves, scrolling behavior, the “unlock” mechanism, how phones sleep and multitasking.
