Re: IBM's 1993 Simon: "The e-mail app even included the ability to click on a phone number to dial it."
Would that not constitute prior art in one of the patents Apple asserted against Android recently? I am only vaguely aware of the finer details so I'm probably mistaken on some point.
Actually, it would. Apple is asserting a patent (from 1996) against Android's "Linkify" functionality which does exactly that.
Other prior art would be Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb (1994/1995) for turning CamelCase into links and, my personal favorite, Netscape Navigator 2.0b1, for "Live URLs" (that recognized URLs and email addresses in mail and news text and made them clickable).
I've been following this off and on, and AFAICT, HTC didn't bring up any of these piece of prior art, which makes me seriously question the quality of their prior art searches.
Would that not constitute prior art in one of the patents Apple asserted against Android recently? I am only vaguely aware of the finer details so I'm probably mistaken on some point.