RIM brushes off HP fondleslab innuendo

You might be sick of the pundits falling all over themselves to pour love on the iPad. You may be sick of the Apple fondleslab. But at least you can recognize one when you see one. The same can't be said for tablets from other big name outfits. Apparently, competitors have reached the breaking points of their creative …

[JaitcH]

Serial thievery? BTW, how can you copy something that isn't released?

So everyone has no ideas except for the ones that they're stealing from Apple? And just where the hell did Apple get them from? So many of the patent filings with Jobs name on them are prior art. Starting with company name and the IP theft from Xerox. Apple couldn't even copy a rice cooker connector without it burning up!

Still, with the new U.S. legislation coming down around patents maybe some of these claims will fall by the wayside.

And how does RIM get to copy HP when HP's pad is so far off? Perhaps if HP spent less time knocking personalities, starting with Hurd, and concentrated on the tasks at hand they would have a better product.

[Anonymous Coward]

Theft?

Check your facts before you show your ignorance. Apple paid Xerox to see the tech and some Xerox employees were aghast that their management would be so stupid.

[Tempest]

Jobs attended several ...

Xerox Parc courses/seminars and copied some of the things he saw.

Apple was previously in use when he pinched that too, as was the name tablet. Jobs only buys or pays for things he can't get free. Thunderbolt is, as someone pointed out, in use by several computer related companies.

Jobs isn't a saint or a god - as he might learn sooner than later. He is simply a clever but crass business man.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And how does RIM get to copy HP when HP's pad is so far off?"

Beta hardware released to blabby early evaluators. Reading the tech press. Looking at patents then changing them slightly so not to infringe. Or they could just take the simple way out - read the glossy marketing releases that HP produced for the device months ago.

There are few secrets in the hardware world. Apple manage the secrecy side of stuff reasonably well, but even they have to pre-release information to third parties to enable all the fluffy crap that goes around the product to be ready in time for release.

[MinionZero]

Prior art does exist before all of them.

They will find Scifi has a lot of prior art long before all these tablet maker companies ever tried to make a tablet. Scifi like Star Trek has shown tablet like devices for decades. Star Trek crew would pass tablet devices to each other all the time in the show. Even the Star Trek consoles on desks and even walls are touch screens and they are not the only ones. The original Tron film had a touch screen desk in it. There are many examples in Scifi of tablets devices with touch screen controls and not just hand held devices, they are even built into the buildings, but still showing the same kinds of design concepts used in today's tablets.

[Ammaross Danan]

Microsoft

I think Microsoft was the first company I had heard of that went out and actually bought the IP from a movie (Minority Report's surface computing that turned into "Microsoft Surface" for those of you guessing). Granted, Minority Report producers found existing research tech to use rather than throwing in something that only works in CGI or in the imaginary-land of stage props....