Listen, what alternative to Apple would you philistines prefer? "Down-your-throat marketing"? Really? I happen to find every piece of print and broadcast advertising created for Apple products to be visually and audibly appealing and in perfect taste. In fact, if all advertising were as well done as Apple's, I might give my Tivo a break once in awhile and actually watch a commercial now and then.

And if you're just so hell-bent on loathing Apple because they won't let poor little you keep your Sprint contract and still get an iPhone like all the cool people you know, then at the very least appreciate the fact that EVERYTHING Apple brings to market just makes EVERYONE else play catch-up (or try anyway) and forces the market to actually improve! Get it?

Secondly I don't know why our layman's definition of invention has to come from the US Patent Office.

Third thing though is this: Apple filed over 300 patents relating to the iPhone, so if it's not an invention I don't know what is. They streamlined several things in order to conserve battery power, be operable by touch on a small screen, and generally be intuitive. An invention can be something as simple as a paper bag with handles that go all the way around to support groceries more reliably. Surely the iPhone counts as an invention.

Finally: these things are amazing. I'm not a Mac lover, I've loathed them all my life. I ignored the iPhone on principle, and then I realized that it was actually quite revolutionary and wasn't just a desperate attempt to put email and "the PDA internet" on a cellphone, but it actually has features that everyone can use and the internet it gives is normal and intuitively accessible.

If you don't have one, buy one. If you can't afford one, steal one. Stop being losers and get an iPhone. Me and all of the cool people with iPhones do not care about technical issues. We just care about attracting attractive, fun, cool, and sexy people to hang with.

The iPhone could be the cure for your loserism!

Apple worshippers’ may believe anything they want but this does not change the fact that iPhone does not logically fit the definition of invention, (I will state it again) because it is neither a “process, machine” nor “improvement, etc., that did not exist previously”. You may want to stretch your logic over the limit and attempt to argue that such combination did not exist (it was e.g., various Windows Mobile devices, as much as you may hate them) but the definition (and practice) specifically excludes “combinations” from being recognised as inventions under patent law.

You argue, by bizarre reverse-logic that if iPhone in not an “invention”, then the proverbial light-bulb also isn’t, but it does not work logically because the “way in which” “glass and filaments and metal” “come together” in Edison’s lightbulb WAS new, and NOBODY combined it like that before, so that it was a “new, useful process”, which does fall under the formal definition of “invention”.

If Edison was “not the first to make” the lightbulb, then he is credited with the invention by mistake, but it does not change the logic of my argument nor does it prove your flawed one.

Let me analogise, a better lightbulb (say one that combines a switch on it and is painted red) wud not qualify as an “invention”, at least not outside Jobs’ reality distortion field.

By that persons definition, computers were not used to get us to the moon, and those nanobots to be used in the near future for heart surgery are not computers either.

Right.

I think the iPhone is an invention, as much so the light bulb was an invention. Light bulbs were made of glass and filaments and metal, but the way in which they come together makes it a light bulb. And who gets credited for the invention? Edison. Even though he was not the first to make one. But he did perfect it.

It IS a wonderful pocket combo: music player and phone. For that reason alone it deserves the award for preserving Apple's dominance for years to come.

I don't own an iPod or iPhone, nor do I care much for Apple or their stuff-it-down-your-throat marketing strategy, but the iPhone does qualify under the "improvement" clause of invention as is worthy of the "Invention of the year" because rather than incrementally improve the phone/PDA/hand-held computer market, it raised the bar significantly. The iPhone stands out in a crowded market, which, in my opinion, no other product/item/invention can say for year 2007.