CUPERTINO, Calif. – Throughout the loud and proud history of the iPhone, the device has been known for its ability to cultivate a fanatical following among customers happy to pay a premium for a mobile phone that could double as a multi-functional status symbol. iPhones and the many plugins available for them have defined countless iconic advertising moments, such as the customer who called upon his for directions to the nearest 18th-century ashtray auction to the woman who, on a whim, used her device to find a used bidet that became the center point of an award-winning PhD dissertation.
But until the latest version of the iPhone, which is scheduled for release this summer, one thing remained beyond the ability of the device – the copying, cutting and pasting of text. Even as the device boasted increasing layers of add-ons such as GPS receivers, interactive fondue menus, virtual pets, soft-porn Japanimation renderers and countless other hi-tech toys, Apple engineers struggled to master one of the industry’s oldest technologies.
The latest iPhone boasts a host of new features, many of them useless
Nate Miles, Apple’s junior vice president for applied iPhone technology, said it was “not obvious” to his staff of engineers how to solve the cut-and-paste problem. “It’s one thing to offer your users the ability to run a physics engine that can simulate water draining out of a rain barrel, or to give them a phone that can shuffle songs simply with a carefree, masturbatory motion of the hand. Figuring out how to make a bunch of unformatted, neutral-font letters disappear from one screen and reappear in another, at the user’s command? That was tough.”
So tough, in fact, that rival companies accuse Apple of sending industrial spies to their facilities in a desperate attempt to capture the elusive technology.
“We had several employees here last year who were suspicious from the get go,” said Jake Desantis, under-director of keystroke technologies for Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry line of smartphones. “I remember we were all sitting around having a discussion about how absurdly unrealistic it is that every character in Hollywood movies is using a Mac. They were the only guys who weren’t laughing.”
Desantis says that his suspicions were further confirmed when one of the employees was audited by the company’s IT department. “For one solid week – 40 hours, not counting overtime – all he did was cut and paste text on one of our test models.”
Similar charges have been leveled by other iPhone competitors, including Palm, Inc., maker of Palm Pilot, Treo and Centro devices. Stephanie Condon, assistant vice president for anti-corporate espionage, confirmed her company also dismissed several suspicious employees around the same time as Research in Motion. According to Condon, these “stool pigeons” were obsessed with copying and pasting text and lingered at the facility’s labs long after others had gone home.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that shortly after these characters leave Research in Motion, Palm and other companies that ‘presto’ – Apple figures out how to copy and paste,” said Johnny Blanchard, a corporate security expert who follows the industry and agreed to speak on the record for a fee. “There’s no question in my mind that Apple is using stolen technology on their third-generation iPhone.”
While Blanchard admitted that the allegedly stolen technology could as easily have been attained via public-domain channels “starting around 1986,” he believes the fruit-named company’s actions were in “bad taste.”
“If it wouldn’t cost more in lawyers than they’d gain in a settlement, I’d urge them to sue Apple,” he added.
The newest iPhone should hit stores in June.
Originally posted 2009-03-25 20:08:20. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
