I love the fact that the huge legal teams from Samsung, HTC, Google etc can't find prior art for Apple's "universal search" patent but you can.
Or maybe if you actually read the patent you would realise it is for a specific client side, plug-in based implementation which at its time definitely didn't exist on any OS.
Wait, no prior art was found? Did I miss an announcement, a failed patent suit, or some other piece of news, or are you just assuming things there?
If the original patent is specific enough to cover only Apple's particular method of searching a phone, then how could Android's unified search be found to be infringing without some sort of reverse engineering or source code examination? If this examination had been done, surely we'd have the results published somewhere.
On the other hand, if the patent was general enough to cover any search across multiple components on a device, then surely it should not have been granted and we should not be cheering for a company that exercises such a monopoly?
If this unified search patent can be used to stop a phone from searching through multiple data types and components, do you actually think that's something that should stand up in court in the first place? Or are you just going to argue that Apple is just making use of the monopolies granted by the system, the rules of the game, and should be excused anyhow?
Ok, I'll come your way. So be it, let's assume this is a very 'innovative patent' as per your theory. Do you think they should be suing all the OEM's for such a ridiculous patent? As an end user, I lost a very important feature on my phone just because a random company whose products I don't even want to own is trying to prove how innovative it is. If you still support them, then I have nothing else to say. Have a nice day.
Although its not on mobile didn't Google's desktop search tools cover an awful lot of this? I certainly remember it returning, emails, documents and other textual data in the result. It also had plugin support.
It may not have existed on mobile but one could argue that much of it did already exist on the desktop, bringing similar functionality to a mobile is not especially innovative in my opinion, its a feature at best. Integrating things is not innovative either.
I would love to see the fireworks of Apple taking Google to court on search patent infringement.
Or maybe if you actually read the patent you would realise it is for a specific client side, plug-in based implementation which at its time definitely didn't exist on any OS.