Openmoko keyboard mockup

Helge Hafting helge.hafting at hist.no
Thu Jan 8 14:26:47 CET 2009


leonardo wrote:
> Rui Miguel Silva Seabra ha scritto:
> 
>>> it's cool, you should really patent it!
>>> :-)))
>> Please die a slow and painful death for suggesting that. [1]
>>
>> Rui
>>
>> [1] unless you were really just making a very bad taste joke :)
> 
> Of course it was [1]...
> T9 is quite emblematic for software patents and patents in general:
> someone patents something which is really nothing revolutionary, the
> effort to produce such an invention is really low, but nobody can
> come-up with something similar for the fear of being sued.
> If you look at the patent itself (wikipedia says:
> http://www.google.com/patents?id=PmgCAAAAEBAJ) you see it's 27 pages of
> pointless diagrams and 7 pages of a very vague description of how a
> "reduced keyboard disambiguating computer".
> At a very fast lecture, the patent might not even apply to our case,
> since it says:
> "The keyboard has twelve keys, nine of them labeled with numerous
> letters and other symbols, and those nine plus one more are labeled each
> with one of the ten digits". It seems if your keyboard doesn't have 12
> keys you're safe. I wouldn't be surprised if T2-T26 would be patented too..

More important, the patent is about "reduced keyboard disambiguating".
If the keyboard isn't "reduced", i.e. it has all the keys, then
that patent doesn't seem to apply.

The illume keyboard aren't missing any keys for example. It only uses a 
dictionary because users sometimes miss. There is no ambiguity at all to 
resolve, only error correction for fat-fingered typing. (T9 does not
try to resolve wrong-key misses) Disambiguating and error correction
is not the same.

Oh, and they mention "keyboards". Many phones has keyboards with about
12 keys.  The neo has a touchscreen instead, its two keys are not used
for text input. :-)

Helge Hafting




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