> BTW, I liked my WM5 phone.

Eep. Scrolling was through the tiny scrollbar on the right, and I'm left-handed to make it even more irritating to use. Closing a window with your finger required a fingernail in the corner (or stylus, add 2 seconds). It insisted on stuffing a Start Menu in there, with careful clickery required to not make mistakes. And a Windows Explorer, with tiny expand-contract [+] thingies. I forget most of the horror.

For others who forget, these were examples of the best apps at the time. Behold the menu bar for some apps, the scroll bar, tree menus (and tree folders, requiring stylii or fingernails), [x]-to-close, the button on the bottom that says "Up". You can see the iPhone was out, and some apps were already influenced by it.

http://www.honeytechblog.com/30-best-windows-mobile-applicat...

My hardware had a slide-out keyboard. Sometimes the flip didn't flip, though, so you'd open and close it multiple times until it woke up. The phone was capable of connecting to the web, but that just generally brought misery. It could do video calls, which was theoretically pretty cool. We tried that once.

Version 5, that was. I think I'm going to put it in a fire, right now.

so i didn't like my phone?

My goal was to add some value to the conversation, not convince you or others that you didn't like the phone. It's not about your opinion, it's about Apple and the state of the art at the time, and what they did to change it. If you have some relevant info about why it was great, paint that picture for other HN'ers who might not have used it.

Sometimes, love defies reason ;-)

Sigh. So much misinformation, so little time...

http://allthingsd.com/20120810/breaking-apple-offered-to-lic...

They offered to license them to Samsung.

For an unreasonable amount ($30-$40 per device). Looks good when they can say, "But we offered to license to them!" before they file the lawsuit.

You offer 30, they say no, 10, you settle on 15. That's called negotiation.

And you know that Apple didn't say "No, the price is 30." how exactly?

And you know the price Apple asked is unreasonable. How exactly?

I cannot find logic that $30 is reasonable, but I cannot find logic that shows $30 is unreasonable, either.

Here is some food for thought: iSuppli claims the iPhone 4S contains $188 of materials (http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/iPhone-4S-Carrie...). That "$188 BOM" 16GB phone sells for $649 on the Apple Store.

Part of the price difference will be the cost of shipping and handling, customer service, warranties, etc, but I think it is reasonable to claim that at least $200 will remain after factoring in those. People do buy these phones, so there must be some $200 of value in an iPhone that is not attributable to its hardware. People will have different views on where that value is, but IMO, it is not unreasonable to assume half of it is in the iPhone UI.

Based on that logic, $30 seems not unreasonable.

My point was that the parent had no idea whether Apple's purported price was negotiable or not.

Whether $30 is a reasonable price for use of the UI elements that Apple claimed ownership of is a completely different question.

You're absolutely right. I should've posted it as a possibility.