While Samsung may have gotten away with what could be considered a small victory on Monday, Tuesday was a whole new day and with it came one very big problem for the company. On Tuesday morning, Apple was successful in admitting into evidence the entire 132 pages of an internal Samsung document that compared the iPhone with the Galaxy S and detailed how the Galaxy could be improved.
As reported by All Things D, the document clearly reveals the fact that Samsung took Apple's iPhone into heavy consideration when looking to improve its Galaxy S products. The document compares two aspects of the iPhone and Galaxy S (labeled as S1) side by side and includes footnotes for "Directions for Improvement".
In a majority of the pages, these directions involved adding features from the iPhone interface that the S1 lacked. They also involved making adjustments to have the S1 interface better match that of the iPhone. Although common sense will tell you it's only natural for competing companies to compare their products, in the courtroom this document hammers in Apple's assertions that Samsung went through very great lengths to copy its iPhone.
Of course, an important part of innovation is to compare your product to that of the industry standard and to find ways to make your product better. Whether you like the device or not, it's indisputable that the iPhone was one of the most popular and best selling smartphones on the market in 2010. Now, we'll just have to wait and see what the jurors think.
You can read the document for yourself here. Did Samsung put too much effort into becoming the iPhone rather than finding original ideas to beat it? Let us know in the comments below.
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Ironslice I call bullshit. If my car is worse than someone else's car, and his car has a GPS, I'm gonna add a GPS to my car. You can't just patent *CAR WITH GPS* and claim it was your invention.Reply -
cuecuemore The big problem with our broken paradigm is that "we" (well, not I, nor anyone else with have a brain) think this is a bad thing. In reality, this is how innovation should work!Reply -
gigantor21 If the government wants my Galaxy S3, they'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands.Reply -
It's pretty clear that's a copy&paste. My question here if we believe that is innovation why we need all those mobiles in the market? Let's only make one modele and every body makes a copy for his own :)Reply
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dalethepcman The document outlines such groundbreaking stolen ideas as "The date displayed on the Calendar should match the current date on the phone" "Landscape mode should be supported when the phone is turned left or right, not left only" "Pressing the NEXT button should not change the case of the alphabet"Reply
This sounds like a bug list from a very early build of Samsung's phone.
As was pointed out, it is natural to compare your product to the current market leader and try to make you product better. All of that being said, there are some items where they certainly wanted it to work just like an iphone and the text clearly shows that, but most of them seem to be limitations of pre-gingerbread android that were automatically implemented courtesy of Google.
The question of the day would be if anything in this entire document relates to round icons, rectangular devices, silver bezels, and prompting to automatically call a phone number when its received in email or text messages, which after reading the entire thing, does not appear to be. -
I'm sure most all companies have some kind of comparison with their market competitors. In my opinion this proves nothing as far as saying they copied the iPhone, or any of it's features; which by the way, Android does have a good majority of the nice ones before Apple integrates them into it's IOS for the iPhone.Reply
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Kami3k clubsaucekillerCan't wait for the Samsung fanboys to try and defend this one.Reply
If this is a violation of copyright then the entire legal system can expect to handle just copyright cases for centuries.
This just goes to show how the patent system, copyright system, etc are all out dated and need to be reformed. -
pronger12 they both stole qwerty, they must be banned from using qwerty keyboards and use dvorak insteadReply