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[delrico]

I've read the exact apparent patents, but I'm kind of confused on what exactly they mean. Can someone put it in simpler terms for me? I understand a decent deal of computers and other tech, perhaps even a rookie tech savant, but still, confused. And what's the chances of this petition actually taking effect? I've been waiting for the GSIII for a while and I'm due for an upgrade.

They're patent #'s 8,086,604 and 5,946,647

[dacy17]

I've read the exact apparent patents, but I'm kind of confused on what exactly they mean. Can someone put it in simpler terms for me? I understand a decent deal of computers and other tech, perhaps even a rookie tech savant, but still, confused. And what's the chances of this petition actually taking effect? I've been waiting for the GSIII for a while and I'm due for an upgrade.

They're patent #'s 8,086,604 and 5,946,647

The '604 patent relates to searching: specifically, the ability to use a single search interface to enter a search phrase, and then have the computer or device retrieve matches from multiple types of sources (applications, file names, file contents, the Internet, etc.) and present the best matches to the user based on an intelligent algorithm or processing on a back-end server. In the current case, this most directly applies to the algorithm that Siri uses to figure out what you're asking for, when you give it a question in a natural language. It is probably also related to the technology behind Spotlight, the global search mechanism in Mac OS X.

The '647 patent is the "data detectors" patent, filed by Apple quite a long time ago. Basically, when the software detects that something is a phone number, an email address, a web URL, etc. it will figure that out and present to you a variety of options specific to that type of data. So if the device sees the string "313-555-1212" in an email, it would highlight that number and present options like "call", "add to contacts", etc. It seems pretty obvious now, but it was actually a fairly novel idea back in 1996.