An IM Patent for the iPhone?

Ian Lamont writes "Apple has filed a patent for IM on portable devices, which could mean that it's getting ready to launch an IM client for the iPhone. The filing is titled 'Portable Electronic Device for Instant Messaging', and covers methods for sending, receiving, and viewing ongoing conversations. The proposed GUI is similar to Apple's current interface for SMS. As for why iChat wasn't enabled for the iPhone earlier, there's some interesting background and analysis here, which also includes a discussion of AIM for the iPhone. IM also came up in the discussions last year about the most-wanted features in iPhone 2.0."

Yet more patent abuse...

[ZephyrXero]

Hate to break it to ya Apple, but there have been cell phones with the ability to use services such as AIM for quite a few years now.

Re:ASK SLASHDOT

[calebt3]

WiFi hotspots make IM cheaper than text messaging.

Re:You know it's Apple

[kithrup]

I found the patent [uspto.gov] via a Mac rumour site.

The main point of difference appears to be the touch screen, but I admit I'm not great at reading patents.

Note that this is also just a patent application; it hasn't been granted yet.

Hmmmm ....

[gstoddart]

So, the usual question about such patents arises.

How the heck can you patent "a method of doing a well-known operation in a slightly new context"?

The issues are the same -- communications protocols, keeping track of sent and received messages, message sequencing, etc. Big deal, they're now doing it on an iPhone. All of the other stuff is just more of the same on top of a different platform that still needs to do the exact same things as other platforms.

Unless I'm missing something, this patent will likely be describing something well known, and enumerating a few points where it's slightly different and therefore is revolutionary rather than an obvious outgrowth of previous things.

Much silliness here.

Cheers

Re:ASK SLASHDOT

[snowraver1]

There is a big different. SMS uses the control channel of the cell tower, where as IM uses the normal data channels. The control channel is limited in bandwidth, where the data channel can accomodate much, much more data.