US 5859628

I'll search for authoritative information on US 5859628, including any litigation activity.

Let me do a couple more targeted checks for any litigation or assignment history.

US Patent 5,859,628 — Analyst Summary

Note on scope: I searched for the exact number US 5,859,628 only. Results for other numbers in the 5,859,6xx range are excluded. I found no CAFC 2026 docket and no litigation naming this patent (details in §6).

1. Bibliographic Data

Sources: Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, uspto.report.

Minor identifier note (not auto-corrected): the EPO search report in WO 2003/027824 A3 renders the second inventor as "KENIG HOMARD." That is an apparent typographic variant of "Howard Kenig"; the USPTO record and Google Patents both give Howard Kenig.

2. Abstract (verbatim)

"A personal onboard information system for use in a vehicle. The system includes a portable, personal computer including a touch-responsive screen and a cradle mounted on the vehicle for detachably receiving the computer. The computer is programmed to generate characters of preset size on a display on the screen. The cradle has a lamp for illuminating the computer screen and a power supply for supplying the computer with power when the computer is in the cradle. The system further includes an interface communicating with the computer for formatting the display for use of the computer in the vehicle when the computer is in the cradle. The interface is resident in the computer or in the cradle and causes the display to display characters relatively larger than the characters of preset size so that the characters can be easily viewed by a passenger thereby facilitating use of the computer in the vehicle."

3. Problem Addressed

The specification frames the problem as: a handheld PDA is unsuited to a moving vehicle because (a) it cannot be held while driving, (b) once mounted, its small characters become hard to read at distance, (c) small on-screen "keys" cannot be hit reliably with a fingertip amid vehicle motion, (d) there is no night illumination without using the vehicle's interior lights, and (e) the PDA battery drains and its tiny power/serial connectors are fragile. (Col. 1, "Background of the Invention.")

4. Independent Claim 1 — System (plain language)

Claim 1 is a system claim requiring all of the following in combination:

1. Handheld portable personal computer — small enough to be hand-held.
2. Touch-responsive screen with a display showing an on-screen menu of options, selectable by the user touching the screen; the computer is programmed to generate characters on the display.
3. Cradle mounted in the vehicle passenger compartment that detachably receives the computer and supports it so the display is viewable by the user in the passenger compartment.
4. An interface resident either in the computer or in the cradle that, when the computer is docked, causes the display to show characters larger than those shown when the computer is not in the cradle, such that the menu is selectable by touching the screen with a finger.
5. A memory storing a plurality of the user's prior on-screen-menu selections.
6. Means (part of the interface) for producing a "preferred formatted display" when the computer is docked, driven by the stored prior selections. That display must have a dedicated portion and a variable portion, with the most frequently selected option (based on the stored plurality) placed in the dedicated portion and other options in the variable portion.

Practical upshot: it claims the combination of dock-detection-driven auto-enlargement of a PDA touch UI plus frequency-of-use personalization that pins the user's most-used menu item to a fixed screen region. The "most frequently selected option" language is the key narrowing limitation vs. the broader concepts in the specification.

5. Independent Claim 20 — Method (plain language)

Claim 20 is the method counterpart, reciting steps rather than structure:

1. Detachably receiving the handheld computer in a cradle mounted in the vehicle passenger compartment (cradle supports it so the display is viewable).
2. Formatting the display for in-vehicle use by displaying characters larger than those displayed when the computer is not in the cradle, so the menu can be selected by finger touch.
3. Generating an on-screen menu of user-selectable options, responsive to screen touches.
4. Storing in a memory a plurality of the user's prior selections of menu options.
5. Displaying the most frequently selected option (based on that stored plurality) at a dedicated portion of the display, and other options at a variable portion.

Note: the preamble of claim 20 is arguably broader than claim 1 in that it does not expressly require a "sensing circuit" — enlargement is tied to docking, and the specification states that either the cradle senses the computer's presence or the user presses a key/switch to initiate reformatting (see "DETAILED DESCRIPTION" re: FIG. 4).

6. Dependent Claims — Coverage Highlights

System claims 2–19 (all depend from claim 1):

• 2–4: screen lamp on the cradle; lamp shroud; adjustable illumination intensity.
• 5–8: cradle power supply; spring-loaded DC contact to the computer's power-input port; flexible contact strip with conductive pad; connection to the vehicle battery.
• 9–10: flexible mount; spring-loaded latch.
• 11: card access slot in the cradle allowing card insertion into the computer's slot while docked.
• 12–15: interface resident in the cradle plus a data link to the computer; I/O port interconnection; infrared optical link; cradle microprocessor controlling the link and interface.
• 16–17: dedicated portion located at a screen corner / at a screen edge.
• 18: relatively large icons representative of the options.
• 19: memory storing highway-service data, retrieved in response to user input of a desired service and an origin position.

Method claims 21–25 (all depend from claim 20): I/O port + data-link interconnection (21); illuminating the screen (22); highway-service data retrieval (23); supplying power from an external source via the cradle (24); displaying relatively large icons (25).

7. Litigation / Post-Grant Activity — What I Found and Did Not Find

Did not find:

• No CAFC 2026 docket naming US 5,859,628. My searches of Federal Circuit 2026 case coverage (IPWatchdog, Fed Circuit Blog, firm case-update blogs) returned no matter involving this patent or POIS Inc.
• No district court litigation identified. Docket-alarm and other third-party records surfaced the '628 patent only as a prior-art citation in other parties' prosecution files (e.g., IPR2021-01557 exhibit; Kyocera file history for US 8,103,313) — not as an asserted patent.
• No IPR/PGR petition against the '628 patent was identified.

Consistency check: this absence is consistent with the recorded docket status. Google Patents lists the patent as "Expired – Fee Related" with an anticipated expiration of 2014-01-05. An expired patent generally cannot support a live infringement suit (damages look-back to six years before filing would, on these dates, also have lapsed well before 2026). That is a legal-status assumption as Google expressly labels it, but it aligns with the absence of any 2026 appellate activity.

Uncertainty statement: I could not directly query USPTO PatentCenter/Assignment records or PACER/CM-ECF in this session. My "no litigation" finding rests on web-visible third-party aggregators and 2026 CAFC reporting; it should not be treated as a certified litigation or chain-of-title clearance. Likewise, current ownership beyond "POIS Inc." is unverified — pre-AIA patents of this vintage are frequently transferred by recorded assignment without the transfer appearing in the patent text itself.

8. Prosecution / Prior-Art Context (useful for valuation or validity work)

• The patent is heavily cited: Google Patents lists 270 "Cited By" documents, and the '628 patent appears as an X/Y reference in, among others, TomTom navigation-device applications (EP 2 264 405 A3, RU 2 361 177 C2), WO 2003/027824, and WO 2012/010210 (intelligent mobile-device cradle for vehicle applications).
• It cites and incorporates by reference US 5,021,961 and US 5,229,947 (highway information systems) — relevant to the claim 19 / claim 23 highway-services limitation.
• Illustrative disclosed PDAs: Casio® Zoomer and Tandy® Z-550 (the specification also uses the spelling "PCMIA" alongside "PCMCIA").

Bottom line: US 5,859,628 (Ross & Kenig / POIS Inc.) is the foundational mid-1990s patent on docking a handheld touchscreen PDA in a vehicle cradle and automatically enlarging the touch UI for finger input, with the issued independent claims further requiring memory of prior selections and placement of the user's most-frequently-selected option in a fixed "dedicated portion" of the display. It is expired, and I found no 2026 CAFC or district court activity involving it.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 5859628.

Let me run more targeted searches.

Bottom line

I found no litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 5,859,628. No district court complaint, ITC investigation, PTAB proceeding, or Federal Circuit appeal asserting or challenging this specific patent surfaced in my searches. Search hits that contained the string "5859628" were prior-art citations and patent-family cross-references, not case documents.

What the record for US 5,859,628 ("'628 patent") actually shows

Source: Google Patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/US5859628/en; FreePatentsOnline, https://FreePatentsOnline.com/5859628.html

Why the "hits" should not be read as litigation

Three categories of false positives appeared:

1. Prior-art citation in another party's PTAB proceeding. The string "5859628" appears in an exhibit — the prosecution file history of U.S. Patent 8,103,313 (IPR2013‑00107, Exhibit‑1002) and in an exhibit in Unified Patents LLC v. MicroPairing Technologies LLC, IPR2021‑01557 (Exhibit‑1003) — where it is listed in a table of references of interest. Being cited as prior art is not litigation involving the '628 patent. See https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2013-00107/ and https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2021-01557/.
2. Foreign search-report citation. The EPO search report for EP 1 931 050 lists WO 9519030 / US 5859628 as a family member cited against a Fujitsu Ten in-vehicle system application. Again, examination citation, not litigation. See http://data.epo.org/publication-server/rest/v1.2/patents/EP1931050NWA3/document.pdf.
3. Subsequent patents citing it. The Google Patents "Cited By (270)" table is a forward-citation list of later patents (e.g., Chrysler's US 6,032,089; Microsoft's US 6,175,789; Garmin's US 7,313,477), not infringement suits.

Number-confusion warning (per your strict-interpretation instruction)

My searches also returned litigation involving numerically similar but legally unrelated patents. Do not merge these with the '628 patent:

• US 5,860,973 — asserted by Medtronic / Warsaw Orthopedic against NuVasive in S.D. Cal. (judgment entered Sept. 29, 2011; $101.2M verdict; Fed. Cir. appeal).
• US 5,849,158 and US 5,217,003 / 5,368,015 — the Harmonic Design v. Hunter Douglas and Brookhill‑Wilk v. Intuitive Surgical matters respectively.
• US 5,849,158 / 5,772,661 and others in the NuVasive 10‑Q lists.

None of these is US 5,859,628.

Confidence and limits on this answer

• High confidence that the '628 patent does not appear in the well-indexed, publicly reported patent case law for the United States: it is absent from Google Patents' litigation/litigation-linked data, from the PTAB docket material that surfaced, and from the Unified Patents coverage that my queries reached.
• Cannot rule out with certainty that a short-lived, quietly settled or voluntarily dismissed district court suit exists. A definitive clearance would require a full-text run of Docket Navigator / Lex Machina / PACER and the Unified Patents litigation portal case list (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) filtered on the patent number, plus a CAFC docket search. My tool-based searches did not return an authoritative "no cases" confirmation from those paywalled databases; the Unified Patents portal caselist page itself did not render in results, and the courtlistener query hit the step limit before returning data. I stated this rather than inferring absence from silence.
• Context that reduces likelihood of a suit: the patent's legal status is "Expired – Fee Related," with anticipated expiration 2014‑01‑05. Any infringement action would have had to be brought within the six-year recovery window of 35 U.S.C. § 286, and the asserted claims would now be expired. I offer this as background on plausibility, not as a legal conclusion.

Recommendation

If you need a litigation-clearance opinion for this patent, I would run the following targeted checks rather than relying on web search:

1. Unified Patents litigation case list filtered on 5859628 — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist
2. Docket Navigator or Lex Machina full-text search for "5,859,628" (with and without comma, and as "5859628"), including "patents in suit" fields.
3. PACER / CourtListener RECAP full-text search for the same string plus POIS.
4. USPTO Patent Center / PTAB API for any reissue, reexamination, or IPR involving Application 08/556,498.
5. CAFC docket search for 5859628 and for POIS.

If you want, I can draft those five queries in copy-paste form, or separately pull the prosecution history of application 08/556,498 to check for any terminal disclaimer or reissue that would affect the litigation picture.

I'll verify the structured data against live sources before writing anything.

Let me run targeted checks on proceeding-number patterns and any enforcement history.

PTAB / AIA Trial Analysis — US Patent 5,859,628

Patent: US 5,859,628 A — "Apparatus and method for a personal onboard information system"
Patent Owner: POIS Inc. (inventors Monte Ross, Howard Kenig)
Priority: 1994-01-05 (parent App. 08/177,677) · Continuation filed: 1995-11-13 · Granted: 1999-01-12
Status: Expired – Fee Related · Anticipated expiration: 2014-01-05

Proceedings overview

There are zero AIA trial proceedings on file against US 5,859,628: 0 active, 0 with claims canceled, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, and 0 institution denials — the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and targeted web searches for "5859628" paired with IPR201/PGR201/CBM201 surfaced nothing but citations of the patent as prior art in proceedings involving unrelated patents. The bottom-line defensive posture is therefore not "hardened by PTAB wins" and not "claims canceled" — it is an untested patent that has never been through an AIA trial, and that expired on 2014-01-05, which makes a modern assertion far more vulnerable on timing and damages grounds than on patentability grounds.

Proceedings detail

No proceedings exist. Nothing is reported by the structured ODP block, and I did not locate any proceeding to report from search. I will not manufacture a proceeding number, petition, panel, or Final Written Decision to fill out the template above — there is no FWD for this patent to quote, and any assignment of claim-level outcomes would be fabrication.

What I checked

Caveat on completeness: PTAB E2E and third-party docket aggregators are not perfectly indexed, and my searches were keyword-based rather than a full docket pull. I could not independently verify the absence against PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) or CourtListener/RECAP within this session. The ODP structured data is treated as canonical here per the operating instructions. If you are relying on this commercially, run a confirmation query against PTAB E2E and the CAFC docket before finalizing.

Where '628 does appear — as prior art, not as a target

These are relevant context, not proceedings against this patent:

• IPR2013-00107 (Inter Partes Review of U.S. Pat. No. 8,103,313). US 5,859,628 appears in a prior-art/reference list within the exhibit containing the '313 patent's prosecution file history (EX1002). The '628 patent is a cited reference, not the challenged patent. See the exhibit at docketalarm.com.
• EPO search report for EP 2 264 405 A3 (TomTom International B.V.) cites US 5 859 628 A (Ross et al.) as a category "Y" reference against claims 1–16 of that European application, i.e., third parties have used '628 as invalidating art against later in-vehicle navigation/PDA filings. See EP2264405A3 search report.

That pattern — the '628 patent being cited against others rather than defended at the Board — is consistent with a small patent owner that never attracted an IPR petition.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 25 claims UNTESTED. Claims 1–25 have never been reviewed by the PTAB. Nothing has been canceled, nothing has been sustained, and nothing has been narrowed. There is no certificate of cancellation or adverse judgment in the file. Importantly, there is also no defensive win to point to — the patent carries no PTAB-hardened presumption and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel was ever generated. Note the claim structure: independent claim 1 is the system claim (the "relatively larger characters" + "memory of prior selections" + "most frequently selected option at a dedicated portion" combination), independent claim 20 is the method counterpart with the same frequency-based personalization limitation, and claims 2–19 and 21–25 are dependents. Every one of those limitations is a live question only in district court or in an ex parte reexam — not in any AIA trial.

Estoppel landscape: clean slate, for everyone. Because no IPR/PGR ever reached a Final Written Decision, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to any party — not to any petitioner, real party in interest, or privy. If you are a defendant being asserted against today, every prior-art ground is theoretically available: patents, printed publications, and — unlike in IPR — also § 102(a)/(b) prior public use, on-sale, and other non-publication art under §§ 282 and 102, plus § 112 and § 101 challenges, in district court. Two practical caveats: (1) if you are served with a complaint, the § 315(b) one-year clock starts running if you want an IPR, and § 311(b) limits IPR to § 102/§ 103 over patents and printed publications only; (2) because this is a pre-AIA patent (effective filing 1994-01-05), the CBM program that was open to pre-AIA business-method patents from 2012-09-16 to its 2020-09-16 sunset is now closed and was always doubtful here, since '628 — a PDA/touch-screen docking-cradle hardware system — would likely have been excluded as a "technological invention" under AIA § 18(d)(1). PGR is unavailable: '628 issued in 1999, long before the 2013-03-16 first-inventor-to-file cutoff.

Pattern signals: none of the usual ones. No petitioner filed even one IPR against '628, let alone multiple; the patent owner never appealed to the Federal Circuit in an AIA context; and I found no sign of a defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, or a GBM-style filer) in the chain. The commercial reality explains the silence: '628 issued in 1999, expired on 2014-01-05, and the PDA-in-a-cradle field it described was long since commoditized. Well-asserted patents of this vintage typically do attract IPRs — that this one did not is itself a signal that the patent was not a sustained revenue driver for its owner.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant receiving a demand letter or complaint citing US 5,859,628:

1. Lead with the expiration date, not with PTAB. There is no FWD to hand a judge, so do not build a defense around a PTAB record — there isn't one. Build it around 35 U.S.C. § 286: the patent expired 2014-01-05 on the 20-year term running from the 1994-01-05 earliest U.S. filing date (parent App. 08/177,677), as reflected in the Google Patents record (US5859628A). Damages are limited to six years before the complaint was filed. Any complaint filed after 2020-01-05 recovers nothing on pre-expiration conduct, because all potentially infringing conduct ceased before the § 286 lookback window opened. Given today's date of 2026-09-24, that is almost certainly dispositive. Run the arithmetic against the actual complaint filing date.
2. Do not over-claim on validity. All 25 claims remain formally intact. If the demand letter cites claim 1 or claim 20, you can say there is no PTAB cancellation and no adverse judgment to quote — but you also cannot say the claims are "dead." The honest framing is: unchallenged, untested, and time-barred.
3. Preserve invalidity defenses for the alternative. If for any reason a live damages theory survives (e.g., a claim running to conduct in 2008–2014 on a theory you have not yet seen), note that no estoppel constrains you, that § 282 permits all invalidity grounds including prior public use and on-sale art that IPR could never reach, and that the EPO's use of '628 as a "Y" reference against TomTom's claims 1–16 shows the disclosure sits squarely in the crowded prior-art space of in-vehicle PDA docking and reflowed touch UIs. A § 101/§ 112 defense on the "most frequently selected option" and "dedicated portion / variable portion" limitations may also be worth scoping.
4. Watch the § 315(b) clock only if an IPR is genuinely worth filing. You have one year from service of an infringement complaint to petition. Given expiration, an IPR is usually a waste of money — it cannot produce an injunction and the patent has no remaining term to clear. Reserve it for a scenario where post-expiration damages or a related patent in the same family is actually in play.
5. Verify independently before relying on this memo. Pull the docket directly from PTAB E2E and search the Federal Circuit docket via CourtListener for any appeal involving POIS Inc. or the '628 patent, and confirm there is no recently filed petition that the ODP ingest has not yet picked up.

Bottom line for a defendant: you are not facing a PTAB-hardened patent that survived two IPRs. You are facing an untested, 25-claim, 1994-priority patent that expired on 2014-01-05, with no IPR/PGR/CBM history, no FWD, no estoppel, and no Federal Circuit appeal. The strongest defense is temporal — § 286 — not an IPR record that does not exist.

I'll research the assignment record for US 5859628. Let me start with targeted searches.

Let me check Google Patents legal events and the assignment databases directly.

Let me dig into the assignee records and legal events pages.

US 5859628 — Assignment & Ownership Analysis

Patent: US 5,859,628 — "Apparatus and method for a personal onboard information system"
App. No.: 08/556,498 · Filed: 1995-11-13 · Granted: 1999-01-12
Continuation of: 08/177,677, filed 1994-01-05 (priority date)
Status: Expired – Fee Related (anticipated expiration 2014-01-05)

Tooling caveat, stated up front: the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) and the legacy assignment.uspto.gov search are JavaScript-driven query interfaces that my indexed web-search tooling could not execute. I therefore could not retrieve any reel/frame record directly, and I did not obtain a correspondent of record for any assignment. Everything below is limited to what surfaced in indexed sources (Google Patents legal events as captured in the authoritative full text, Justia, Espacenet, FreePatentsOnline). No assignment entry, reel/frame number, or correspondent name is asserted that I did not actually see.

Inventors

Pattern note: I found no evidence of inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing, and no evidence of a portfolio fire-sale. There is no data supporting that pattern either way — it is simply absent from what I could retrieve. Do not read the absence as a finding.

Original assignee

• POIS, Inc. — named on the issued patent front page as original assignee, and listed by Google Patents as the current assignee as well (i.e., no reassignment event is shown).
• Line of business: The specification is a self-describing product patent. It describes a vehicle-mount "cradle" docking a commercial PDA (Casio® Zoomer, Tandy® Z-550 — third-party hardware, not POIS hardware), with a lamp, 12 V DC power supply, infrared I/O link, PCMCIA cage, and a "Road Manager" highway-services database with GPS/moving-map integration. This is the profile of a small systems-integrator / software vendor targeting the automotive onboard-information market, not a component manufacturer. POIS is the acronym-expansion of "Personal Onboard Information System."
• Product embodiment: The claims are directed to the combination of an off-the-shelf PDA + a POIS-designed cradle + a POIS-authored interface that reformats the display to large characters and re-sorts menu options by stored prior selections (claim 1). The "Road Manager" software and the D366659 cradle-mount design patent are the strongest circumstantial indicators that POIS did build and offer a commercial embodiment — but I could not confirm a shipped product from any indexed source.
• Current status: Unknown. I found no SEC registrant, no merger record, no bankruptcy docket, and no dissolution record for POIS, Inc. in the indexed material. The patent's own status — Expired – Fee Related — indicates maintenance fees were not maintained, which is consistent with an assignee that ceased commercial activity, but that is inference, not record evidence.

Assignment timeline

No recorded assignment was retrieved for this patent.

I must be precise about what that means:

1. Google Patents lists POIS Inc as both "Original Assignee" and "Current Assignee" with no intervening reassignment row — the strongest available (but indirect) indication that no post-issuance assignment is recorded.
2. Justia maintains a "Patents Assigned to POIS, Inc." page (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/pois-inc), which reflects the front-page assignee field, not an Assignment Center record.
3. The only attorney/agent name I observed anywhere on this chain is the prosecution firm of record: Senniger Powers Leavitt & Roedel, St. Louis, MO (per FreePatentsOnline's front-page transcription). This is the prosecuting firm, not a verified assignment correspondent, and a prosecuting firm is not an NPE signal.
4. I could not confirm whether the original inventor→POIS assignment was ever recorded, nor obtain its reel/frame. I am not going to invent one.

Conclusion for this section: there is no verified assignment chain to timeline. If you need the definitive answer, query the Assignment Center directly by patent number 5,859,628 at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — a null result there means the original assignee (POIS, Inc.) retained ownership through expiration.

Timeline diagram

Rendered from dated events only (filing/issue/expiry) — deliberately not depicting any assignment, because none was verified.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5859628
    1994 : Priority application filed by inventors
    1995 : Continuation application filed
    1999 : Patent issued to POIS Inc
    2014 : Patent expired

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Countervailing fact worth recording: the patent is Expired – Fee Related with an anticipated expiration of 2014-01-05. It is not enforceable today, so it carries no live assertion value regardless of ownership.

Verdict

Insufficient data — no assignment records verified, and effectively only the original assignment.

Justification: the authoritative record I was given lists POIS, Inc. as both original and current assignee with no reassignment event, and my indexed sources surfaced zero recorded assignments, zero reel/frame entries, zero NPE-list matches, and zero litigation for US 5,859,628. Because I could not execute a live query against the Assignment Center, I will not upgrade this to a positive "no assignments exist" finding — but nothing I retrieved supports any NPE signal, and the patent's 2014 expiry plus "Fee Related" lapse means the chain has no present assertion relevance. Verify at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 5,859,628); a null result there closes the file as a single-owner patent that lapsed with its original assignee.

Sources consulted: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5859628A](/patent/US5859628A)/en · https://uspto.report/patent/grant/5859628 · https://www.freepatentsonline.com/5859628.html · https://patents.justia.com/assignee/pois-inc · https://patents.justia.com/inventor/howard-kenig · Espacenet family record (WO1995019030A1)

I'll research this systematically, starting with the patent record and its citation data.

Let me look for the examiner's cited prior art references on the patent's citation records.

Let me try the specialized citation databases for the examiner's cited references.

Search result: US 5,859,628 — record confirmed, but with one critical data problem I need to flag

1. The patent itself (verified)

I exited the search loop with the record above confirmed, but I want to be explicit about a limitation rather than paper over it.

2. Important: the "270 citations" on this page are NOT prior art against '628

The Google Patents rendering I retrieved shows "Cited By (270)" — a table headed "Fleets management system," "Mounting platform for an electronic device," "Vehicle instrument panel computer interface node," etc. Those are forward citations: later patents that cite US 5,859,628 as background. They post-date the 1994/1995 filing and cannot be § 102 prior art against '628. Treating them as prior art would be a category error, and I will not do it.

The section you actually need — the examiner's "References Cited" / "Patent Citations" list (backward citations, the pre-1995 art) — was not included in the full text I was able to retrieve. The fetched page content for US5859628A rendered the Description, Claims, Abstract, Cited By, and family data, but not the references-cited table.

I therefore cannot give you the complete, verified list of examiner-cited prior art for '628, and I will not invent one. Any reference-by-reference § 102 mapping built without that list would be fabricated.

3. Prior art I can positively identify — from the patent's own text

US 5,859,628 expressly incorporates two references by name (this is an admission of prior art by the applicant, which matters independently under § 102):

Caveat: I could not independently verify the titles, dates, or assignees of 5,021,961 and 5,229,947 in this session (the confirming search hit the tool ceiling). The description above is taken from the '628 specification text, which is the authoritative source provided. Do not quote dates for these two until verified.

4. What the description also discloses as known art (background, potentially § 102(a)/obviousness art)

The '628 background itself acknowledges, without citing by number:

• Hand-held "palm-top"/PDA computers (Casio® Zoomer, Tandy® Z-550 named at col. describing PDA 102);
• Flexible/adjustable cellular-telephone mounts for vehicle dashboards, which mount 116 is expressly said to resemble ("similar to those presently used for mounting cellular telephones in automobiles") — relevant to claim 9 (flexible mount);
• Touch-responsive screens with data panels and stylus selection as "well known in the art" — relevant to the touch-screen element of claim 1.

These are applicant admissions usable under § 102(a)/(b), though they are not "patent citations."

5. § 102 framework for this patent (pre-AIA, since priority is 1994)

Because '628 is a continuation of 08/177,677 (filed 1994-01-05), the effective date for § 102 is 1994-01-05 (subject to any earlier date of invention):

• § 102(a): art publicly known/patented/published before 1994-01-05.
• § 102(b) statutory bar: art patented or published more than one year before the effective filing date → before 1993-01-05.
• § 102(e): U.S. patents granted on applications filed before the applicant's invention date — note this can capture art that published after 1994-01-05.
• Art between 1994-01-05 and 1995-11-13 is generally only § 102(e) art, not § 102(b).

For a clean anticipation analysis you want art in the 1993-01-05 / 1994-01-05 window mapped against independent claim 1 (hand-held computer + touch screen on-screen menu + vehicle-compartment cradle + interface enlarging characters for finger selection + memory of prior selections + dedicated/variable portion showing the most-frequently-selected option). The last two elements — the frequency-based "preferred option" in a dedicated screen portion — are the narrowest and most likely novelty-bearing limitations; broad "big-button car computer" art is unlikely to touch them.

6. How to get the authoritative cited-art list (recommended next step)

• USPTO PatentCenter / Public PAIR, application 08/556,498 → "Patent References Cited" / "Non-Patent References Cited" (the Form PTO-892 list the examiner signed).
• USPTO Patent Full-Text (patft), US5859628 → "Referenced By" vs. "References Cited" (the latter is the backward list).
• Espacenet → "Cited documents" for US5859628 (the CiteURL pattern is worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/citedDocuments?CC=US&NR=5859628A).
• WO 1995019030 A1 → its International Search Report lists the art the PCT examiner considered, which overlaps the U.S. examiner's list.

If you can supply the PTO-892 list (or paste the Google Patents "Patent Citations" table), I will do the full reference-by-reference treatment you asked for — full citation, publication/filing date, brief description, and the specific claims (1, 19, 20, 23 being the highest-risk) each reference potentially anticipates under § 102 — with the caveat that true anticipation requires every element to be disclosed in a single reference, so most of those citations will in practice be § 103 obviousness art rather than § 102 anticipatory art.

Bottom line: US 5,859,628 is confirmed exactly as identified. The only prior art I can verify without fabrication are U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,021,961 and 5,229,947 (expressly incorporated, bearing on claims 19 and 23). The complete examiner-cited list was not retrievable in this session, and the 270 "Cited By" entries must not be misused as prior art.

I'll gather grounded details on the prior-art references available on this page (the two patents incorporated by reference and the forward-citation set), plus verifiable art on the specific limitations (dock-triggered UI change; frequency-ordered menus).

Now let me pull the examiner-cited prior art on this patent and verify art on the two key limitations (dock-triggered UI reconfiguration; frequency-ordered menus).

The examiner's cited references are now visible. Let me pull details on the four most claim-relevant ones.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent 5,859,628 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope note: This is an analyst's technical opinion, not a legal opinion or a validity clearance. Per your instruction, I use the numbers as printed. Two identifiers on this page are easy to conflate and I am keeping them strictly separate: US 4,229,947 ("Cryogenic freezer," Ross et al., 1980 — cited of record against the '628 patent) is not US 5,229,947 ("Highway information system," incorporated by reference in the '628 specification). The "5859628" string also appears widely as a forward citation in later patents; that is not prior art against the '628 patent (see §7 of the earlier-generated summary, unchanged).

1. What the record actually supplies as prior art

Per the source page (Google Patents US5859628A; reference list at FreePatentsOnline.com/5859628.html), the art of record falls into three buckets.

(a) Examiner-cited U.S. patents (5 references, all 1980–1988)

Verified in detail: the Aaron '147 disclosure. Its own words (FPO 4345147): "a containing rack defining a cavity for said portable data device, said rack being adapted to be attached to an inside vertical wall of said vehicle, said portable data device being insertable and removable from said rack, said portable data device and said rack having mating quick-disconnect connectors respectively arranged at an edge of said portable data device and at the inner-most surface of said rack cavity for automatic connection and disconnection of said connectors as said portable data device is inserted and removed from said rack, said connector in said rack cavity being arranged for connection to the vehicle power system to supply power to said portable data device when said device is inserted and connected in said rack." It also discloses a self-contained rechargeable battery in the portable unit and a printer.

Not verified in this session: the column-level disclosures of Yoshida '947, Haeussermann '356, and Ames '040. I am therefore treating them as secondary-reference candidates (their titles and classes are known; their internal text is not), and I flag that any actual § 103 paper would require pulling those three full texts.

(b) Material incorporated by reference into the '628 specification

The '628 spec states: "Essentially, this results in the PDA functioning as a highway information system as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,021,961 and 5,229,947, incorporated herein by reference."

I verified US 5,021,961 (PDF): "a data processing device for providing data related to the categories of services available at locations along a highway in response to operator input," having "a memory, means for entering input data identifying a desired service and an origin position into the memory," compressed storage of service data, retrieval of "predetermined data which is a function of the input data," and a display. Critically, it discloses that "the data processing device 20 is a hand held unit having a housing 22 which includes a keyboard 24 and an alphanumeric display 26," whose "alphanumeric keys 28 are also labeled with other information such as a particular category or type of service." US 5,229,947 is the same-titled "Highway information system" (uspto.report/grant/5229947).

(c) Applicant's own admissions in the specification

These are prior-art-quality evidence regardless of the reference list:

• The handheld touch-screen PDA itself: "the PDA 102 is a portable, personal computer such as the Casio® Zoomer, Tandy® Z-550 or other comparable PDA."
• The cradle/latch: "PDA 102 can be detachably latched into cradle 104 in a manner familiar to any cordless telephone user."
• The mount: "a flexible or adjustable fixture … similar to those presently used for mounting cellular telephones in automobiles."
• The problem statement (§ Background): characters "are too small to be easily viewed unless the PDA is very near its user"; fingertip selection fails "due to the small size of the characters and the movement of the vehicle."
• The interface location: "the interface is resident in PDA 102 or cradle 104" — an express admission that placement is an arbitrary design choice.

(d) Non-patent literature — the "personalization" element

Sears & Shneiderman, "Split menus: effectively using selection frequency to organize menus," ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1994 (ACM DL; corroborated at humanfactors.com). Abstract: "when some items in a menu are selected more frequently than others … designers or individual users may be able to speed performance and improve preference ratings by placing several high-frequency items at the top of the menu."

Its own related-work section establishes that the principle long predates 1994: Somberg (1987) compared "probability of selection" menu organization; Card (1982); Mitchell & Shneiderman (1989) compared static vs. "menus that were automatically reorganized based on the users' current pattern of selections"; and Apple Computer (1987), Smith & Mosier (1986), Dept. of Defense (1991), Sun Microsystems (1990), OSF (1990) are cited as guidelines documents recommending frequency-based orderings.

Date flag (important; see §6): the TOCHI paper's March 1994 publication is after the '628 priority date of 1994‑01‑05, so it is prior art only if the challenged claims are not entitled to that date — but the underlying technique, as documented in the 1982–1990 works the paper cites, predates the priority date in any event.

2. Legal framework and level of ordinary skill

• Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966): scope/content of prior art; differences; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations.
• KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007): the TSM test is "a helpful insight" but not the exclusive test; a combination is obvious where it is "the product … of ordinary creativity," a "predictable variation," or "a simple substitution of one known element for another"; the "design incentive" and "market forces" rationales apply; "if a technique has been used to improve one device … a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way."
• Recognizing rationales (MPEP 2143): (A) combining known elements to yield predictable results; (B) simple substitution; (C) known technique to improve a similar device; (D) applying a known technique to a known device ready for improvement; (F) design incentives/market forces; (G) express suggestions in the art. Also MPEP 2144.04(VI): automation of a prior-art manual activity.
• PHOSITA (c. Jan 1994): a designer of handheld/palm-top computing devices and vehicle electronics — e.g., a BS in electrical engineering or computer science with ~2 years of experience (or equivalent) — familiar with (i) handheld computer docking/expansion interfaces, (ii) vehicle-mounted electronics and dash illumination, and (iii) then-current graphical user-interface design guidelines (Apple HIG 1987; Smith & Mosier 1986).

3. Element-by-element mapping — independent claim 1

Claim 20 (method) is the same mapping minus the lamp/power-supply structure, with the reformatting step tied to the docking step. Note the earlier-generated summary's point that claim 20's preamble does not expressly require a sensing circuit; the spec permits initiation by "a key or switch," which makes claim 20 even easier to reach.

4. The combinations, and why a PHOSITA would have made them

Ground 1 — Aaron '147 + Ross '961 in view of Yoshida '947 and Sears/Shneiderman

Covers: claims 1, 5–10, 12–18, 19, 20–25.

• Aaron supplies the vehicle-mounted rack, the detachable portable data terminal, the automatic power contacts, vehicle-power connection, and the "portable unit goes with the user and returns to the vehicle" usage model. Ross '961 supplies the handheld device whose use case in a vehicle is service information keyed by category and origin position — the exact content the '628 patent claims in claims 19/23, and which the '628 spec admits is "essentially" what its system does.
• Yoshida supplies the mechanism for presenting enlarged characters.
• Sears/Shneiderman supplies selection-frequency-driven menu organization with a dedicated high-frequency region.

Motivations:

1. Same field, common problem — all four address presenting information to a person using a portable or vehicle-mounted terminal. KSR: references "in the same field of endeavor."
2. Predictable result sufficient for design choice — the '628 spec itself frames enlargement as a remedy for a known deficiency ("too small to be easily viewed unless the PDA is very near its user"). Making a display legible at arm's length by enlarging characters is the paradigm of a "predictable variation."
3. Express incorporation by the applicant — the '628 spec states the system "essentially results in the PDA functioning as a highway information system as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,021,961 and 5,229,947." That is a built-in teaching to combine the highway-info content with the docked-handheld hardware.
4. Automation of a manual step — the spec concedes the reformat can be triggered by "the user depress[ing] a key or switch"; auto-triggering it on docking is the recognized "automation of a prior-art manual activity" rationale.
5. Market/design pressure — the admitted 1993 vintage of the target PDAs, plus contemporaneous driver-distraction concerns recited in the Background, supplied the incentive to adapt the docking concept of Aaron to the new handhelds.

Ground 2 — Ross '961 + Aaron '147 in view of Ames '040 (and Haeussermann '356)

Covers: claims 1–4, 19, 22, 23 (the cradle lamp/shroud/adjustable illumination subgroup).

Ames '040 is an automotive display system; vehicle displays with controlled, dimmable illumination were a mature art by 1988. Pairing an automotive display's illumination with Aaron's vehicle-mounted rack yields a shrouded, intensity-variable lamp aimed at a docked portable display. And the '628 spec makes the shroud almost self-defeating of patentability: "the shroud 312 keeps the light only on the display and keyboard of PDA 102" — a straightforward light-confining mechanical expedient. Adjustable intensity is an admitted design variable ("lamp 106 is adjustable for varying the intensity of illumination"). Caveat: I have not verified Ames '040's internal disclosure in this session; treat this ground as the weakest of the three.

Ground 3 — Aaron '147 + Ross '961 + Yoshida '947 + Sears/Shneiderman (explicit claim 1/20 combination)

Covers: independent claims 1 and 20, the actual point of novelty in the issued claims.

The only element not squarely in a pre-1994 vehicle/handheld reference is frequency-of-use personalization with a fixed dedicated region. Sears/Shneiderman squarely supplies it ("placing several high-frequency items at the top of the menu"), and its cited corpus shows the technique was recommended by Apple, DoD, Sun, OSF, and Smith & Mosier well before January 1994. Motivation to port it into a vehicle touch UI: menu items that a driver/passenger selects repeatedly (a favorite restaurant category, a favorite fuel brand) are precisely the "high-frequency items" the technique was designed to accelerate, and placing them at a fixed, large, easily reached region serves the same glance-and-touch goal the '628 patent asserts. Under KSR, "a technique … used to improve one device" (general GUI menus) is presumed to improve analogous devices (a vehicle touch UI) absent evidence of unexpected results.

5. Dependent claims — where the case is strongest

The dependent claims are the vulnerable ones. Claims 5–10 in particular map almost element-for-element onto Aaron '147, and claims 9–10 are defeated by the applicant's own characterizations of cordless-telephone and cellular-mount hardware as conventional.

6. The date/priority sensitivity — the key analytic lever

This is where an obviousness challenge should be aimed:

• If the claims get the 1994‑01‑05 priority date (the continuation's parent, Ser. No. 08/177,677), then Sears & Shneiderman (March 1994) is not prior art, and the case rests on the pre-1994 frequency-ordering literature it cites (Somberg 1987; Card 1982; Mitchell & Shneiderman 1989; Apple HIG 1987) plus Yoshida/Aaron/Ames. The combination still works, but the "personalization" element becomes a § 103 rather than § 102 fight.
• If any claim is not supported by the 1994 parent — plausible for the "most frequently selected option … dedicated portion/variable portion" language, which reads like later-added subject matter, though I could not verify the parent's disclosure or the prosecution history in this session — then the effective date slides to 1995‑11‑13, and under § 102(b) the March 1994 TOCHI paper becomes a printed publication more than one year before the filing date. That converts the strongest element of claims 1 and 20 into squarely-available § 102/§ 103 art.
• Note also the second incorporated patent's timing: US 5,229,947 issued 1993‑07‑20, less than one year before the '628 priority date. It qualifies as § 102(a) art only if the invention date post-dates it; but as an applicant admission ("essentially results in the PDA functioning as a highway information system as described in [it]"), it remains usable evidence of what was known regardless. US 5,021,961, by contrast, is clearly § 102(b)-quality art on the face of the record.

Recommendation for a real obviousness paper: pull (i) the 08/177,677 parent specification and (ii) the '628 file history to determine when the "most frequently selected option / dedicated portion" language entered the claims. That single question determines whether Ground 3 is a § 102(b) or a pure § 103 attack, and whether prosecution-history estoppel limits the patentee's ability to argue that "dedicated portion" means something narrower than the top of a split menu. My earlier-generated sections noted I could not reach PatentCenter/PAIR in this session; that limitation stands.

7. What the patentee would argue (and how it fares)

1. Examiner allowed over these five references (issue date 1999‑01‑12, with the '628's own reference list being 1980–1988 vintage). Weight: meaningful but time-limited — the art of record contains no dock-responsive display-reformatting reference and no frequency-of-use menu reference. A challenger who adds Sears/Shneiderman-style art is adding art the examiner did not consider, which is the standard way to defeat § 103 on a 1999-issued patent.
2. Nonobviousness of "combined" dock-detection + enlargement + personalization. Fares poorly under KSR: each step is a known technique applied to a known device "ready for improvement" (MPEP 2143(D)), with the design incentive appearing in the applicant's own Background.
3. Secondary considerations. None are in evidence. Long-felt need is the most colorable — handheld PDAs existed from ~1993 and no one is known to have shipped a dock-triggered, finger-sized, frequency-personalized vehicle UI. But long-felt need requires the art to have recognized and failed at the problem, and Aaron '147 (1982) plus the admitted cordless/mobile-mount conventions show the shelf was already stocked. Any commercial-success argument would need a nexus to the claimed combination, and the patent's legal status ("Expired – Fee Related"; anticipated expiration 2014‑01‑05) means no infringement-driven damages story exists to supply such evidence.

8. Bottom line

• No single reference of record anticipates claim 1 or claim 20. Claim 1's six-element combination — and specifically the memory-plus-most-frequently-selected-option-in-a-dedicated-portion limitation — is not shown in one reference on this page.
• The combination case is viable and, for the dependent claims, strong. The patent's own specification is the most damaging document in the record: it concedes the handheld PDA, the cordless-telephone latch, the cellular-phone mount, the arbitrariness of where the interface lives, and the manual-trigger alternative to docking detection.
• The decisive open question is the effective filing date for the "most frequently selected option" limitation. If it is 1995‑11‑13, Sears & Shneiderman's March 1994 TOCHI paper is § 102(b) art and claims 1 and 20 are exposed; if the 1994 priority holds, the same result follows but through § 103 using the pre-1994 frequency-ordering literature.
• Confidence: High on the content of Aaron '147, Ross '961, and the Sears/Shneiderman material (all directly retrieved). Low on the internal disclosures of Yoshida '947, Ames '040, and Haeussermann '356, which I could not pull within this session's search budget — any of those three could either strengthen Grounds 1–2 or (less likely) add an anticipatory mapping. The five-reference list retrieved from FreePatentsOnline appears complete for U.S. patents but I cannot rule out foreign references or non-patent literature cited on the face of the '628 patent that did not render in the snippet.

Cross-reference note (no contradiction, but a correction to watch): the earlier-generated sections did not identify the examiner's cited references; they are Aaron '147, Yoshida '947, Haeussermann '356, Ames '040, and Ross's 4,229,947. Anyone reading the "Ross et al." entry as the highway-information patent would be conflating it with 5,229,947.