#Live tiles android

#Live tiles android

It's sort of the same situation as Apple and Google - Google doesn't make any hardware, so Apple's been focused on taking Android hardware manufacturers to court. (This sounds ridiculous, and it is.) Until the Surface, Microsoft was in the business of selling pure software, so it wasn't really an attractive target for a patent lawsuit based on these types of hardware / software claims. Most of what we think of as 'software patents' are really this type of hybrid hardware / software claim - pure software patents were disfavored until fairly recently, so lawyers and the USPTO would pretend that software turned a general-purpose computer into a specialized machine, and then try to patent that machine. Most 'software patents' are really hybrids of hardware and software That's very much what Microsoft's Live Tiles do, but there's a catch: SurfCast's patent claims are for 'a device under control of a program' and 'an electronic readable memory to direct an electronic device,' not pure software. Broadly, the patent covers selecting a variety of information sources, assigning each of those sources to a tile, and updating those tiles at variable refresh rates.

SurfCast owns US Patent #6,724,403, which was filed in October 2000 and issued in April 2004. Microsoft's held high-profile launches of all three products lately, so news of the case is being reported widely - but a basic examination of SurfCast's patent reveals Microsoft's move into selling its own PCs is the key to the complaint. Microsoft's been touting its Live Tiles concept ever since Windows Phone 7 launched two years ago, but the launch of Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and particularly the Surface tablets appear to have given a company called SurfCast an opening to file a patent lawsuit over the concept.