Here is more on his testimony from CNET and Recode:
We couldn’t meet our power requirements if we had that active a state,†Apple human-interface head Greg Christie said on Friday, testifying at the Apple-Samsung patent trial. “We had to resort to a power button.†The company was also worried about the phone sending inadvertent emails or “pocket dialing.â€
“We knew we had to have a locked mode, or a locked state, where it wouldn’t let you do most things, except you could unlock it.†Christie and his team then worked on a solution, eventually settling on the slide-to-unlock mechanism that shipped on the iPhone and is among the patented features at issue in the case.
He also repeated that the iPhone was a serious risk for Apple, as it was something new to tap into. He further said that it took 3 years to make the iPhone, and it went through 100 design tweaks to ensure that it would be understandable to anyone.
One of the biggest challenges is that we need to sell products to people who don’t do what we do for a living,†Christie, one of the inventors of the slide-to-unlock iPhone feature, said. When designing products, Apple keeps in mind that it wants “normal people – people with better things to do with their lives than learn how a computer might work – to use the product as well as we can.†[…]
Christie, the second witness to testify for Apple in this trial, after marketing chief Phil Schiller, walked the jury on Friday through the process of developing the first iPhone in the mid-2000s. Much of his time on the stand was spent emphasizing Apple’s efforts to make the device easy to use. According to various surveys Apple conducted — and that were made available as court exhibits — ease of use is the most important factor for smartphone buyers.
Bottom line: Apple is trying to say that Samsung is being sued over inventions Apple has put a lot of effort into and they’re worth quite the money. Apple is asking $2 billion in damages from Samsung for infringing its 5 software patents.
