Re: And their patents suck...
Unified search is not what SIRI does, unified search is where you use one search box to search all of the phone and online. Before we had unified search, you had to specify if you wanted to search online or in your contacts or diary or whatever.
iOS unified search pre-dates Android unified search because it was in the OS when it launched in 2007, almost two years before the first Android handset hit the market (HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1, October 2008). And yes, I'm well aware that Android development started in 2005, but iOS development started in 2001; without inside knowledge you can't say which one had unified search first.
Speaking to your phone, usually called voice control, was also a feature of iOS from the early days, but was also available on Nokia handsets in the 1990s.
SIRI is not Apple's product, they bought the company in 2010. SIRI is described as a "mobile assistant", which is meant to process natural language, so instead of just being able to say "call Fred" like any other voice control system (including the one already built into iOS), you can say things like "Where am I meeting Fred?" and it will find the diary entry, and *then* you can say "call him" or "text him" and it will 'understand' that you are talking about Fred (that's the clever bit).
This is what a lot of people don't appear to understand judging by the number of "but I can already ask my phone to call someone" and "Apple are claiming to have invented voice commands" comments I see.
Anyhoo.
Google bought Aardvark (which is supposed to work in a similar fashion) around the same time, but don't seem to have done much with it yet.
Oh, and I think you'll find that Google launched Chrome on September 2, 2008, which is usually considered to be after January 2007, so it was not out before Apple started developing the iPhone. Not only that, but Google introduced the first voice search into the BlackBerry version of Google Maps in mid 2008 and then added it to the iOS version in November 2008.
Apple hating is all very well, but if you can't get at least some of your facts right you'll weaken your case.
All of that aside, I don't think Apple's patent is valid, I remember wishing my Nokia had a unified search quite some time ago (well before the first iPhone launched), so I don't think it would pass the "non-obvious" test.
On the other hand, slide to unlock is not something I remember seeing anywhere before iOS (I may be wrong), so while I would agree that it seems petty to patent it, I do think it is a non-obvious solution to the problem.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
