Apple's made a lot of noise lately about the strength of its patents covering the iPhone's multi-touch interface and the lengths to which it will go to defend them. Most recently its harsh talk was aimed at Palm, whose new Pre device also features multi-touch. VentureBeat is now reporting that Google left support for multi-touch out of its Android OS -- because Apple asked it to, and Google didn't want to jeopardize its relationship with the company. VentureBeat sources the claim to an anonymous "Android team member", while a recent multi-touch hack for the G1 device was made by uncommenting several lines of code. This would indicate the capability was in the OS, but later "commented out", meaning it was left in the code, but preceded with an instruction for it to be ignored by the device. If this is true, it's scary to think that companies would make these sorts of arrangements in which one competitor gets to determine the features of another's products. Competition benefits everyone: consumers get the benefit of innovative new products, while companies get spurred on to continue development and continue raising the bar. Setting up an environment in which people need permission to innovate really doesn't help anybody -- even Apple, who apparently now believes it's got more to gain by keeping competition out of the market, rather than by focusing on innovation of its own. Is multi-touch really so important that Apple needs to make all of these defensive moves? Or has the company run out of the sorts of ideas that have kept it a step ahead of its rivals?

After Palm showed off its new Pre smartphone, including the device's multitouch interface, at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, Apple made some threatening noises about how it would go after anybody who "ripped off" its intellectual property. As always, we didn't see how this would benefit anybody in the marketplace, since competition pays benefits to consumers, and drives participants, even Apple, to continually innovate and improve their products. Now, a wireless industry analyst has called Apple's threats into question. He makes the point that a long, drawn out IP fight won't help Apple's business in the long run: "Building on the company's legacy as one of the greatest innovators in the technology industry may be a smarter business model than taking on the rest of the industry in a battle that may be impossible to win."

His reasoning is twofold: first and most obviously, Apple stands to gain more by competing in the market than competing in the courts. Second, he says that if Apple went ahead with patent suits, it may not be able to win them. He says that it appears that much of Apple's multitouch IP portfolio is based on work from a couple of its employees -- who also were granted a number of multitouch patents while they were employed by the University of Delaware. The University holds those patents, while the analyst also found a lot of potential prior art he says could threaten the Apple patents' validity if they're reviewed. So if Apple realizes the patents may not stand up to a review, it could explain the bluster; but once it's clear the threats are empty, they hold no value. The question now seems to be how long Apple will try to play out the show, and how many resources it will throw at it that would be better spent on developing its products.

When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone a little over a year ago, he played up the fact that Apple had filed approximately 200 patents on some of the technologies included in the phone. This seemed a bit surprising because so many of the technologies found in the iPhone were already found elsewhere -- just not in as pretty a package. Also, despite all those patent claims, it hasn't stopped a whole bunch of companies from filing patent infringement lawsuits against Apple for technologies found in the iPhone. As we've pointed out, playing up the patents seemed rather pointless. Apple was going to sell a ton of iPhones no matter what, and even if others copied the basic technology, it's unlikely they would be able to get anywhere near the attention the iPhone would get (nor the sales). We've already seen that with the iPod. Despite competitors coming up with technology that some consider to be better, the marketing and positioning of the iPod keeps it on top of the market (by a large margin).

Wired is now pointing out another potential downside to Apple's patent claims. Despite there being a ton of work by others done on the concept of the "multi-touch interface," Apple's patents on the concept may force everyone else who uses multi-touch to come up with different multi-touch commands. In other words, rather than there being a common set of multi-touch commands, which would help widen the overall market, the patents may fragment the market, forcing everyone to learn a different set of multi-touch commands based on which device they're using. That's progress?

When everyone got excited about the multi-touch interface on the iPhone, such things have been around for a while. Microsoft is trying to bring multi-touch tables to market, focused mainly on casino and in-store kiosks. However, one of the things that kicked off a lot of interest in multi-touch systems was the demo that Jeff Han did at TED in early 2006. Han perhaps is feeling a little left out of multi-touch feeding frenzy as Microsoft and Apple are popularizing the concept -- and it appears that he's finally found something of a route to take his products to the consumer market (previous reports had said he's done well in military applications). Engadget points us to thegadgetsite, who discovered that Nieman Marcus (yes, Nieman Marcus) will be selling Han's newly dubbed "Media Wall" for a mere $100,000. Now go back and watch the video above again. At the beginning, Han notes that the exciting part of his work is that it's "low cost" and "very scalable." $100,000 doesn't quite seem "low cost" unless you're a Google founder. Well, hopefully, that scalability will quickly lead to economies of scale that will make the "low cost" part a little more accurate.