Sure, there are slight differences, and maybe they add up to enough of a difference for a lawsuit to not be possible, but it looks almost exactly the same. The patents were filed in July, shortly after the release of the iPhone, coincidence? I think not.

We could see it in a new Zune Phone, maybe the next version of Windows Mobile, so the iPhones competitors can come out with something that truly looks and works almost exactly like the iPhone. That’s probably the only way they’ll give the iPhone any competition is to copy it almost exactly.

So should Microsoft get the Originality Award of the Year? No, not ever, didn’t they do this same crap with Vista? So I suppose you can expect their wannabe iPhone OS to have several bugs and errors in it as well making it unusable until at least service pack 1, I see a pattern here.

Microsoft Phone Patent Looks Just Like the iPhone [via gizmodo]