Apple wins patent for original iPhone
Apple's 2007 phone has snagged a patent for its design, naming Steve Jobs and Jony Ive as just two of the inventors.
The original iPhone has finally won a patent for Apple nearly six years after its debut.
Granted yesterday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the patent is actually for the design of the phone, specifically "the ornamental design of an electronic device."
In addition to Apple design guru Jony Ive and the late Steve Jobs, other people credited for the invention are Bartley Andre, Daniel Coster, Daniele De Iuliis, Richard Howarth, Duncan Kerr, Shin Nishibori, Matthew Rohrbach, Douglas Satzger, Calvin Seid, Christopher Stringer, Eugene Whang, and Rico Zorkendorfer.
The original iPhone was unveiled by Jobs in January 2007 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. The late Apple co-founder told the crowd that "we're going to make some history together today."
Touting features that we now take for granted in our phones, Jobs called the device a "video iPod and a regular iPod, plus a phone." And he said that "it's widescreen when you hold it in landscape mode, on its side." To show that the iPhone really was a phone, Jobs made a call to Ive during the demonstration.
The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone to hit the market. But it was arguably the first to revolutionize the smartphone industry as we know it today.