Our sibling-site PreCentral.net points us to an interesting developer commentary up on Ars Technica which provides this little golden spitball of insight:
he had a lot of good things to say about how Palm is handing the extremely nascent developer community and his hopes for the future of the platform. The developer told us that he has explored mobile development on Apple’s iPhone SDK and found much of the company’s position towards their community to be “developer-hostile”—an obvious reference to their insistence on enforcing a pointless NDA well past its expiration date and their strong hand in regulating what can and cannot be developed for its platform.
Apple, of course, is providing Cocoa Touch, an iPhone-optimized version of their Objective C frameworks that, while highly administrated by Apple, provides desktop-class power with a hefty of amount of access to developers. Palm, by contrast, is using Mojo as an open, web-standards based framework for the webOS, which we’re guessing will be something similar to how Widgets work (half way between WebApps and native apps).
Every solution comes with compromises, so in the end it will be up to each developer to choose which platform(s) best suit their needs and the apps they want to build, but is the way in which Apple treats developers — something entirely outside the SDK — going to be a concern as competing alternatives like Android and webOS become increasingly available?
Joined by special guest, Mickey Papillion, the
Cell Phone Junkie, Rene and Chad FINALLY get into some iPhone vs. Palm Pre (
technical and
legal!) action with Smartphone Expert’s editor-in-chief — and resident
Palm expert — Dieter Bohn who was live at the keynote and got quite a bit of
hands-on time with the Pre at CES.
Is the Pre better? Can it compete? How will Apple answer? Or will those multi-touch patents stop Palm dead in their tracks? Listen in the find out!
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ll be talking about the iPhone vs. the Palm Pre tonight on iPhone Live! (Hopefully with some special guests!). In the meantime our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, writing on behalf of our sibling site, PreCentral.net, points to Engadget’s in-depth coverage. Dieter’s conclusion on calls the “Potential Palm Pre Patent Portfolio Pugilism Puzzle”?
Do Apple and Palm (which is increasingly Apple-esque after their recent hires) have the kind of corporate attitude necessary to just swallow their pride and accept that there’s space at the top of the hill for two smartphones, each licensing their patents to each other? If you take a look at the sorts of statements that Roger McNamee made in this Kara Swisher interview, you’ll see that the answer for Palm is clearly yes. They’ve said for a long time that they expect that there will be plenty of space for everybody in the smartphone market, nobody needs to fail for them to succeed. Will Apple be able to play nice too?
Reads like the haughty days of cold war mutually assured destruction to us, so we have to ask: Will Chairman Jobs push the button?
(Any answer beginning with “you’re goram right he will!” gets double comment points!)
What was once but an administrative possibility has become the most sublime of legal certainties: Apple has been granted the multi-touch patents.
Credited to the one, Steve Jobs, and the many, Scott Forstall and the iPhone team, the news patents are simultaneously as wide ranging as they are specifically crafted towards the implementation of one or many fingers interacting on the screen in a mobile device, with the most subtle of heuristic interpretations.
Apropos the heretofore mentioned anomaly; ergo Palm Pre’s exacting duplication of the iPhone’s multi-touch gestures and behavioral interactions and Apple’s deliberately obscure threats in their direction, these new patents provide a single, potentially catastrophic result of a singular equation: Apple has grounds to sue.
Vis a vis Palm’s own far-reaching patent portfolio in the mobile space: these remain a perplexing, perhaps equation changing variable. Through one door, a cross licensing agreement. Through the other, years if not decades of litigation.
In sum, the situation remains predictably uncertain.
(Thanks to David, Chad, and everyone who sent this in!)
Following up on Apple Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook’s comments during yesterday’s Q1 conference call, and the supposition that he was hinting that Apple may just take legal action against the Palm Pre for violating Apple’s intellectual property (i.e. patents), PC Mag quotes a reaction from Palm:
A spokeswoman at Palm said Thursday that the company has not been contacted by Apple’s legal team, to her knowledge. “Palm has a long history of innovation, obviously reflected in our own products and our own robust apps portfolio,” she said. “We have long been recognized for our fundamental patents in the mobile space. If we’re faced with legal action, we’re confident that we have the tools to defend ourselves.”
When asked whether gestures like “pinching” were universal, or belonged to Apple, the Palm spokeswoman said that “our position is that multitouch has been around a long, long, long time before Apple introduced it.”
We learned that Apple first began patenting multi-touch in 2004 and acquired additional patents when they bought Fingerworks in 2005, but is Palm hinting that — as PreCentral.net pointed out — they may have some patents of their own to fight back with?
Curiouser and curiouser…
