What an entirely non-obvious and novel invention! A shame these guys weren't around when email was first developed... I'm sure having to pay them to license a patent to read your emails in non-chronological order would have advanced the technology no end.

what lucent/avaya whatever would say about this. they have unified messaging that is supposed to work like this (ie display voice messages, email voice messages etc.)

Sounds like they patented the feature set to Supervoice, Datafax pro etc. Supervoice had voicemail with attributes that could play messages out of order. It worked with PC voice modems.

A quick search on Google groups shows it was available in 1993 a year before the patent.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.modems/browse_thread/thread/beb66532aad9a86c/6b52109c676bd86f?lnk=st&q=supervoice+1993#6b52109c676bd86f

Looks like another company that look at what was new and slapped in a few patents.

"to access messages in a selective manner based on the identity of the caller"

What's the FUNCTIONAL difference between that and a personalised post-it note?

None whatsoever, as far as I can see. They both allow the recipient to select messages based on the identity of the person leaving the message.

That's it, another bogus patent potentially squashed. And yet more evidence of the US Patent Office granting patents for elementary common sense. Has USPO ever granted patents on personalised post-it notes? I suspect not -- because it is indeed elementary common sense -- so why does it always take leave of its senses whenever the patent involves software?

...it's another insidious thing to troll.

!!

Aren't the caveats of patents that a layman couldn't make it up and there's no prior art - well I'm not sure about the latter but the former resides squarely in the department of the bleedin' obvious.

Not that I like the fugly outdated crapola that is the iphone (htc have been doing better for longer) but this is stupid - patent trolls should be shutdown and there patents given up for free - if they're not using the patent to protect the product they're developing then they're stifling the market going against the spirit of the patent process.

My USRobotics Voice Modem thing which runs on Windows 98, but not XP (it's that old) has software to allow you to pick a message from a list (by caller ID, arrival order, date/time) and play it (or view it if it is a fax).

NeXT had voice (lip-service) in their emails in 1992.

Taking on the world's leading manufacturer of REALLY EXPENSIVE telecom gear over a patent integral to their business, knowing full well that they could produce prior art would be an INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE legal proposition. Taking on a second-rate consumer electronics manufacturer that's pretending to be a phone manufacturer is quite another animal.

I'd be surprised if Apple has to cough up money over such a tenuous link between this "invention" and selecting voicemail out of chronological order.

The patent describes a device that allows a caller to use his phone's keypad to send DTMF (aka Touch Tone) signals to the an answering machine. In this way the caller can send his phone number. Wow! What will they think of next? This part of the invention seems to have been superseded by Caller ID.

The answering machine has been cunningly pre-programmed by its user to match the incoming number to the caller's name. Again, we already have this with Caller ID on your average phone's display - mobile or otherwise.

The patent claims that there is currently no way for the called person to match a caller to a message without listening to all preceeding messages and recognising the caller's voice. This is patently untrue (see what I did there?). I have a digital answering machine that shows me the caller's number, associated name and time stamp. This allows me to scroll through my messages until I see a name/number that I'm interested in and Job's your uncle!

Once you have all these data items on a system it would be criminal not to allow the user to select or sort them to his heart's content.

Skype has it too. What's the big deal? And there's about two top (paid) results from google that do the same thing when you search for "visual voicemail".

Stevie Gods, or anyone at Apple for that matter, hasn't had an ORIGINAL idea since .... well ever.

FIRST affordable "PC" was 8008-based Scelbi-8H microcomputer 1973 - NOT Apple I

FIRST "PID" was the Psion - NOT the Newton

FIRST One Piece Computer was the Osborne and Kaypro - NOT the Korean made iMac.

FIRST pocket MP3 player was the RIO, NOT the iPud.

FIRST wireless streaming media console, D-Links MediaLounge (by TWO YEARS), NOT the Apple TV.

FIRST x86 based PC's - EVERY buddy buy Apples - "Me Too Clone PC MacIntel"

Apple steals the name iPhone from Cisco, after seeing the LG Prada prototype at a show in Germany and STEALS the idea for the iPhony.

But here is a FIRST for Apple, the FIRST computer company to out-source EVERYTHING they sell to our side contractors, starting with the Apple IIe made in Canada. Apple hasn't MADE anything they sell since 1996 when they closed the Roseville CA "assembly only" facility.

That's Apple and Stevie Gods ..... the Great iNOvator.

I'm off to start up my company to make really crappy things that don't work properly but will in the future. Holographic comunication anyone?

Wildfire on Orange also let you play messages out-of-order, sort them by sender, date, or whatever you preferred. The difference was it was voice controlled - great for handsfree use. I don't give a monkeys about the "visual" element, I would happily pay a small monthly subscription for a service like Wildfire.

And unlike Orange's new voicemail tart, Wildfire actually sounded friendly without sounding "matey". And wildfire didn't sound like she smokes 60 a day...

Apple is never revolutionary in anything they do.. They just know how to package things nicely, and sell it to the masses as the second coming (whatever it is).. so ask me if I am surprised that they copied something again.

I think that patents of that nature are total BS...but It is fitting to see Apple on the receiving end .. since they are the kings of BS patents.

You seem to have some pretty odd ideas about what Apple claim.

First affordable "PC" - Firstly the Apple was the first machine to reasonably be identified as a "PC" by todays standards (QWERTY keyboard, video display) and secondly the Scelbi-8H was beaten to market by the Micral.

First "PDA" - Apple were the first to coin the term PDA. The first example of what we'd recognize as a PDA today was probably the Psion Series 3, not the Organiser

First One Piece computer. I don't think that Apple have claimed that, but you're WAY to late anyway. The Commodore PET or Zenith Z80 can probably make that claim.

I could go on, but first tell me what Microsoft invented themselves?

I can't see why your getting in such an agitated state about Apple. Noone really claims they bring out new things first, or make their own stuff, which really makes them no different then a company such as Microsoft, but then they are both big business and tend to work the same.

They do however package things in quite a unique way. No phone is like the iPhone (and stealing the name? Come on with everything apple starting with i what else did people expect them to call it?), it doesn't have all the best tech inside and lack of tech is a reason I wont buy this version but it is however on its own in the market. That's an Apple product, it is different, not new.

Wildfire wasn't just friendly, she was a slut.

Don't tell me you never uttered the command "I need a favour" only to get back the "What kind of favour?" reply in what sounded like a bad X rated movie sound track.

In fact she also used to get pissed off at repeat commands and started to sound grumpy.

between seeing Apple getting the beating it richly deserves this last year, and the fact that software patents are satan's invention, and just need to be destroyed............

In the abstracts, both these patents specifically require that the CALLER enters information using DTMF. Surely iphone does not require that?

It is also quite a stupid idea since the caller could put in any DTMF tones and pretend to be someone else, but lots of patents are stupid...

Prior art must be before March 31 1992 (patent filing date).

(Usual caveats, IANAL).

Not much of an Apple fan, but let's get a grip. The floppy-disk drive on the Apple ][ was sufficiently cheaper and more robust than all that had gone before to mark a real departure. The difference between an affordable personal computer with removable, random-access, reasonable speed storage and all that went before is significant. If you don't think so, you are probably not old enough to get chills at the mention or "Kansas City" and "Tarbell".

The obvious difference between MS and Apple is that Apple steals ideas from others and then claims they thought of it, as has been their motto for decades and echoed by their paid-off media hacks as Apple being the great innovator.

Neither Microsoft nor Bill Gates has ever promoted themselves as an innovator, but more as a product Integrator. MS doesn't hide the facts that they've bought most of the individual software PIECES they have Integrated into bundles. MS was the FIRST to sell an Integrated office application suite in MS Works and Office. Apple had to BUY ClarisWorks to get their bundle! (and it wasn't even complete either).

Yeah, so show us WHAT has Apple innovated in software since System 7 thru OS 9?? OS X is a rip off of BDS, UNIX and the quirks of NeXT (and it's buggy as hell and security holes Apple patches more often then MS does Windows.)

Apple bought Final Cut Pro, bought iWorks, and bought Logic Pro; all the other dweebie "iApps" are dorky ultra scaled down versions of other programs and generally they suck - like iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie or HD and iCal - are all iCrap.

Oh, Apple threw together Aperture, but what a flop - NO "Pros" use it, and here's what reviews say according to Wikipedia: "A number of reviewers have commented that the performance of Aperture v1.5.x is markedly worse than that of Adobe Lightroom v1.0.x." (Lightroom - an AMATEUR program!)

So hey Apple FanBoi, people in iGlass Houses shouldn't throw stones .... especially when they DON'T do any research first (typical Apple Kool Aid Drinker).