QWERTY Patents
RIM is suing Handspring over the QWERTY keypad on the Treo products (90,
180, 270, and 300). Since I'm fairly curious about this issue, I looked
up RIM's keyboard patent. Here's the link:
It appears that Handspring has violated this patent in multiple ways,
and should have licensed the technology from RIM. I'm not sure how I
feel about the QWERTY keypad being a patentable concept, but some of the
claims should hold up in court.
Here's the patent abstract:
ABSTRACT:
A hand-held electronic device with a keyboard, thumbwheel, display and associated software is optimized for use of the device with the thumbs. The associated software has a plurality of features to optimize efficient use of the limited keyboard space and encourage the use of the device by thumb-based data entry through the thumbwheel and/or through a combination of minimal number of keystrokes. Software features include international character scrolling, autopunctuation, undo, character substitution and phrase substitution. In addition, the keys on the device keyboard are optimally shaped and configured for thumb-based input.
4:49:25 PM 
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