There's no other way to put this one folks, but the poop is about to hit the proverbial fan. No one here is a stranger to the onslaught of Apple patents that hit the webz weekly. They are so frequent, we gave up trying to keep up with them, but Tuesdays patent bonanza held a very special one known as Multipoint Touchscreen or patent number 8,125,463. The patent reads in part:

A touch panel having a transparent capacitive sensing medium configured to detect multiple touches or near touches that occur at the same time and at distinct locations in the plane of the touch panel and to produce distinct signals representative of the location of the touches on the plane of the touch panel for each of the multiple touches is disclosed.

That encompasses just about every smartphone and tablet on the market. The image above (taken from the 34 page document) is obviously a tablet, or probably the Galaxy Note ( I kid...sort of), being manipulated in multi-touch fashion. Apple's patent attorney's spent a good amount of time and money researching this patent, seeing that it includes 365 US and 74 foreign patents dating back to 1956. Google and it's partners patent law teams, will be scouring over these patents, but patent number 8,125,463 could end up being a giant thorn in the side of any device not running iOS. This won't sit well with many, and we can already feel everyones blood boiling.

Steve Jobs was not kidding when he said he wanted to destroy Android. Stay tuned on this one folks, the repercussions could be staggering.

Thanks WestOkid for the tip!


Source: The Register