Apple Wins Patent for the Original iPhone Design

Apple is on a patent winning spree today with the USPTO granting the Cupertino giant full rights to several inventions, including the design particularities of the original iPhone.

Launched in 2007 by Steve Jobs himself at the popular Macworld convention, the original iPhone is also referred to as “iPhone 2G,” because it featured GPRS and EDGE support for data transfer.

Steve Jobs is credited with the invention of the product as he was the one to conceive the idea of using a multi-touch screen, rather than a physical keyboard, to interact with the computing device.

The same method went on to give birth to the iPad and the rest is history, as they say.

Now Apple not only owns hundreds of patents pertaining to the technical features of the handset, the company also owns the design – a rectangular object with tapered edges and a few distinct, Apple-signature marks.

The “claim” over at the USPTO is for “the ornamental design of an electronic device, as shown and described.”

No description is provided, just the list of inventors (reproduced below), which counts over a dozen people who were involved with the design of the handset, including the late Apple co-founder, Steven P. Jobs (emphasis ours).

“Andre; Bartley K. (Menlo Park, CA), Coster; Daniel J. (San Francisco, CA), De Iuliis; Daniele (San Francisco, CA), Howarth; Richard P. (San Francisco, CA), Ive; Jonathan P. (San Francisco, CA), Jobs; Steve (Palo Alto, CA), Kerr; Duncan Robert (San Francisco, CA), Nishibori; Shin (Portola Valley, CA), Rohrbach; Matthew Dean (San Francisco, CA), Satzger; Douglas B. (Menlo Park, CA), Seid; Calvin Q. (Palo Alto, CA), Stringer; Christopher J. (Woodside, CA), Whang; Eugene Antony (San Francisco, CA), Zorkendorfer; Rico (San Francisco, CA).”

Not surprisingly, Apple’s Chief Industrial Designer, Jonathan Ive, is also on that list.

A year after Jobs’ death from pancreatic cancer, Jonathan Ive has taken his place in the “vision” department, so to speak – the Human Interface division.