I am absolutely going to persuade my mother to switch to an Android in a few months' time. And then recommend it to every friend of mine who's upgrading their phone, mentioning in passing that Apple has actually gotten Galaxy Nexuses and Tabs blocked in the US. I'm glad Android is actually good enough at this stage for me to do this.
The '604 search patent is a big hot mess of ideas thrown together to cover all sorts of "maybe-this-maybe-that" use cases and potential improvements. It basically means having a unified search system that relies upon "search heuristics" for multiple domains. Like the other allegedly infringing patents in the case, it's another broken patent that IMO shouldn't have been granted. Does anyone know of prior art (prior to Dec '04) for a search mechanism that obtains search results from multiple domains using sub-plugins and combines them into a list? That seems to be the core of the idea, and further ideas are thrown on top of it in the patent application thereafter.
> Does anyone know of prior art (prior to Dec '04) for a search mechanism that obtains search results from multiple domains using sub-plugins and combines them into a list?
Well, in the mobile space everyone is suing everyone else. Google is using Motorola for that and are banning in Germany important parts of Apples e-mail and iCloud services.
> [..] in the mobile space everyone is suing everyone else. [..]
> Because of that and as a German I wont ever buy Android and also telling my friends.
So you won't ever buy anything ever again?
As you say yourself it's the whole industry that is playing this game, so it seems unfair to take it out on just one company. Biased much?
The '604 search patent is a big hot mess of ideas thrown together to cover all sorts of "maybe-this-maybe-that" use cases and potential improvements. It basically means having a unified search system that relies upon "search heuristics" for multiple domains. Like the other allegedly infringing patents in the case, it's another broken patent that IMO shouldn't have been granted. Does anyone know of prior art (prior to Dec '04) for a search mechanism that obtains search results from multiple domains using sub-plugins and combines them into a list? That seems to be the core of the idea, and further ideas are thrown on top of it in the patent application thereafter.
Read it yourself at http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...