Apple vs. Samsung Lawsuit to Drag Into Eighth Year With Retrial Scheduled Next May

[kdarling]

Er... yes, Apple's lawyers cherry picked a Samsung publicity image that was used by virtually every retailer selling Samsung phones.

If they did that, then fair point.

Meanwhile, here's the app drawer on a HTC hero (about a year post-iPhone) - which is what I had at the time:

Yep, I still have an HTC Eris sitting powered up on my desk as a clock. Loved Sense UI.

Note that although, functionally, it is a rectangular grid of app icons with a lower row of function buttons, the visual style is significantly different to the iPhone, whereas the Samsung directly imitated the style of the iPhone icons and function bar.

Yes, but not as exactly as people think. Even that internal comparison review document that was done after their phone came out, noted that their icons lacked some of the nicer iPhone qualities. (That doc also noted that the look was still too close and that they should differentiate themselves more... which they later did, and that's when Galaxy sales really took off.)

E.g. yeah, its got a phone handset icon on the call button, but it hasn't got a white handset on a shiny green button with rounded corners.

The green handset icon is a favorite topic of mine, because Apple could've used a different slant / color set than others, but they didn't.

Likewise, people like to bring up Samsung later using a microphone for their recording app, totally ignoring the fact that Apple wasn't first at that, either. HTC had done it years before in their WinMo phones:

In fact, the whole iPhone skeuomorphic touch friendly UI scheme was an idea similar to industrial touch GUIs that had been around for decades. Which is why a Dutch judge threw out Apple's slide-to-unlock patent. Partly because the NeoNode had done a slide unlock years before, and partly because it acted nearly the same as a spring-loaded industrial GUI on/off button.

Apple didn't come up with the idea of a finger friendly UI. Heck, even Star Trek TNG had done it in the 1980s.

"Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab."​

... so no, it wasn't stealing.

Tell that to Xerox, who later sued Apple for pretending that they invented the GUI. It's an internet myth that Apple got a license in exchange for Xerox's investment. Not even Apple has ever claimed such a thing in court or out. It doesn't even make sense. No other early investor gave up anything in exchange for a pre-IPO purchase option.

 

[fyun89]

And who will hear this “noise?” Macrumors members?!
Apple sued Samsung for copyright infringement, not for marketing purposes. Lets get real here.

News and other media covers them. Have their names spoken by people = getting attention = marketing

 

[Will do good]

Apple stole patents from VirneTx and made billions off those patents and the outright theft of those patents was far worse than anything Apple claimed Samsung "stole" so Apple certainly had no problem with and thinks it's ok to steal.

So you claim Apple stole one Patents, while I'm saying it's not OK for Samsung to steal the WHOLE iphone wholesale.
There was no iphone design or interface before.
[doublepost=1509119733][/doublepost]

Steve Jobs stole plenty of ideas....remember xerox?

I think they pay for it with a small amount in licenseing. While Samsung stole the whole iphone wholesale.

 

[ChrisCW11]

8 years later, I think you have to be pretty naive person to mistake a phone that has the "Samsung" label on the front of it as an iPhone, regardless of what the icons look like.

 

[kdarling]

I'm also aware that Google, not Samsung is responsible for the "copying" in question. I assume Apple chose Samsung because it didn't stop there with them (they copied packaging style, ads, etc). I don't know the real reason.

Interestingly, Apple offered to license their iPhone IP (slide to unlock, etc) to Samsung. However, as a base rate they wanted $40 per tablet, and $30 per smartphone. (And yet they have the gumption to complain that paying $10-15 to Qualcomm for actual necessary patents is too much.) Samsung didn't think Apple's patents were valid, so they declined.



I think Apple thought Samsung was an easier target because it was a "foreign" company, vs. Google being down the road in California. Plus heck, without Google services the iPhone would've been mostly a useless toy at first.

Still, the row of icons is suspect, to say the least, wherever it's at. I don't recall any device prior to the iPhone implementing it the way Apple did, and Android's app drawer is obviously "iOS-inspired". A good example of a different implementation is, say, Windows phone's tile interface. So whether Jobs is the source of the leak is irrelevant. The question is whether Android copied iOS.

The thing is, Apple didn't invent the idea of an icon grid or dock. Nor did they invent rounded or shaded icons. Even the number of rows and columns is pretty much dictated by well known touch UI guidelines.

But yes, Samsung's app drawer looked very similar to Apple's combination. Thus they infringed and must pay.

Now the question is, how much does a rarely seen app drawer contribute to the overall product?

 

[Sefstah]

News and other media covers them. Have their names spoken by people = getting attention = marketing

Ok fine. If this is true, then show me the number of sales related to this specific “marketing strategy”.

 

[theluggage]

Yes, but not as exactly as people think. Even that internal comparison review document that was done after their phone came out, noted that their icons lacked some of the nicer iPhone qualities.

Wow - I love that document - Summary: "make the icon corners more like the iPhone, make the 3d lighting more like the iPhone (actually, its plainly clear that there's already some 3D lighting there, just less distinct) but, er, make it look less like the iPhone". Typical UI evaluation report up there with the standard "Add this; add that; add the other... Oh, by the way, the screen's too crowded...". We've all been there...

The green handset icon is a favorite topic of mine, because Apple could've used a different slant / color set than others, but they didn't.

So, lets see, you have
- Winmo: A white handset on a distinctively shaped green button, accompanied by the word "talk" with the usual matte skeuomorphic shading.
- Skype: A circular white-handset-on-green button with a ridged edge and a shiny skeuomorphic finish.
- Apple: A square white-handset-on-green button with rounded corners and a shiny skeuomorphic finish.
- Samsung S1: A square white-handset-on-green button with rounded corners and a shiny skeuomorphic finish

...it's the difference between "that has clearly been inspired by these things that have gone before" and "that is clearly a direct copy of this".

It's an internet myth that Apple got a license in exchange for Xerox's investment. Not even Apple has ever claimed such a thing in court or out.

Nor did I.
Nor AFAIK has anybody claimed that Xerox had Apple sign a NDA before their visit(s) - which would be standard practice if you invited a potential competitor to tour your development labs and expected them to license what you showed them. Seems like Xerox wasn't aware of the value of what was going on at PARC until Apple made a success of it (it wouldn't have happened today - Xerox would have patented the hell out of whatever the researchers had for breakfast each day).

Fact remains that Xerox had (or could have taken) a stake in Apple's success. Also, as the linked article said, a lot of the ideas Apple "stole" from Xerox were already common knowledge and no more invented by Xerox than they were by Apple. Don't forget the mother of all demos in 1968 that introduced a ridiculous numbers of the concepts of modern computing...

Imagine, though, the giant manga mecha fight if Xerox had productized what they had (or properly partnered with Apple) and gone toe-to-toe with IBM in the corporate PC market...

 

[ackmondual]

1. I think they're trying to set a precedent and 2. come on, the similarities are just glaring. It's very obvious that Samsung looked at the iPhone and just did their best to copy it exactly.

I was thinking why Samsung can't just take a page out of when Apple sued Microsoft, and Xerox sued Apple, but the whole "stealing a GUI" thing does seem to be on a different level.

 

[kdarling]

Typical UI evaluation report up there with the standard "Add this; add that; add the other... Oh, by the way, the screen's too crowded...". We've all been there...

Yep, we've all had such reviews. And it's apparent from all the stuff that Apple has borrowed from Android and Palm, that Apple internally does the same thing. They're just better at hiding those documents from courts

- Apple: A square white-handset-on-green button with rounded corners and a shiny skeuomorphic finish.
- Samsung S1: A square white-handset-on-green button with rounded corners and a shiny skeuomorphic finish

...it's the difference between "that has clearly been inspired by these things that have gone before" and "that is clearly a direct copy of this".

You're talking about the enclosing box which is a generic icon shape which doesn't belong to anyone. And again, Samsung's icon was NOT a direct or exact copy. Seriously, are most guys that design blind? Or perhaps the words "direct" and "exact" don't mean what you guys think they mean

In fact, the USPTO refused to trademark Apple's first icon, as it was not distinctive enough. Apple had to add distinctive features such as background stripes to get a trademark, a feature which Samsung did not use.

Thinking they're a direct copy of each other, is like thinking a blue paid shirt with a button-down pocket is the same as a blue dress shirt with an open pocket. Maybe it's a male thing. I think a woman would instantly notice that they're different.

Seems like Xerox wasn't aware of the value of what was going on at PARC until Apple made a success of it ...

I think that Xerox executives only wanted to use it in expensive office machines. Thus the Xerox Star.

(it wouldn't have happened today - Xerox would have patented the hell out of whatever the researchers had for breakfast each day).

Yeah. Apple learned from the Microsoft trial that look and feel isn't that easy to protect with copyrights. Thus they switched to promoting software patents instead.

And yes, I'm a big fan of Doug Engelbart. I also agree that the GUI was already headed out into the world. Heck, one of the Xerox guys wrote GEM that Atari later used. It didn't matter if Apple had existed or not, the GUI paradigm was on its way to the general computing public.

Likewise, if Apple had never made a phone, we'd still have seen finger friendly capacitive devices all over. Although they (perhaps thankfully) probably would not have ended up being slabs of breakable glass.

 

[biscuitsxluv]

Sue! Sue! Sue! Welcome to America!

 

[theluggage]

Thinking they're a direct copy of each other, is like thinking a blue paid shirt with a button-down pocket is the same as a blue dress shirt with an open pocket.

"Thinking they're an exact copy of one another, is like thinking a blue checked shirt with a buttoned pocket is the same as a plain blue shirt with an open pocket"

...see what I did there? Yes, anybody can see the differences between the two sentences, but it is still blatantly obvious that I plagiarised your work.

Likewise, if Apple had never made a phone, we'd still have seen finger friendly capacitive devices all over.

...it might have taken a while if Apple hadn't knocked Microsoft and Blackberry off their perches.
Its worth remembering that pre-iPhone, Android was going to be button/joypad driven (remember the mini-trackball that was a feature of the first couple of generations of Android phones?)

There's actually an interesting video of an Android demo from November 2007.

Half the demo shows a blackberry-like UI driven by keys, with a very, very different interface to the Android we know. The other half shows a capacitative touchscreen phone - yay! - but remember this was months after the iPhone launched and best part of a year after it was first demoed so that's nothing surprising. Look closely, though and you'll see that its just a few apps using touch to scroll and manipulate graphics (Maps, browser, globe demo) - the primary OS UI, though, is using some sort of off-screen control. Look at e.g. around 3:45 when he pops up a menu, and then scrolls the "coverflow-style" history display, or 4:40 when he launches Maps. At 4:41 you can just see "1: Previous; 3: Next" on the bottom of the screen! No finger-friendly menus or app launching in evidence.

So, yeah, while touch screen phones were in the pipeline in 2007, touch-centric OSs with finger-friendly navigation - not so much.

 

[Johnny907]

Garbage phone. iOS and the original iPhone was FAR AHEAD of the Prada.

It really wasn’t. It was a proof of concept. As I said, it didn’t become better than everything else on the market until the 3G and iphoneOS 2.0.

 

[Mirice99]

So you claim Apple stole one Patents, while I'm saying it's not OK for Samsung to steal the WHOLE iphone wholesale.
There was no iphone design or interface before.

They didn't steal the WHOLE Iphone and anyone who thinks so if either a complete fanboy, blissfully ignorant, or just stupid. Plenty of phones had a grid system with a touch screen.

Second I'm not claiming they stole one patent from VirneTx, Apple has been found guilt multiple times of stealing patents used for FaceTime, arguably the 2nd biggest feature of the iPhone.

 

[convergent]

It really wasn’t. It was a proof of concept. As I said, it didn’t become better than everything else on the market until the 3G and iphoneOS 2.0.

Completely agree. I posted two Samsung phones that had every feature the original iPhone had, several years ahead. Also had touchscreen and icons. The original iPhone had pretty meager sales numbers, being exclusive to one carrier. What put the iPhone on the map was the App Store and thousands of free or cheap apps, plus the refinement and dumbing down of the whole experience so that non geeks could more easily play too. You can't really patent that. Samsung definitely mimicked some of Apple's stuff, they got snacked, and they changed. But where did Apple get their ideas? Look at the phones I posted. Definitely goes both ways.

 

[ilovemykid3302012]

While Samsung stole the whole iphone wholesale.

No, they didn't. Stop.

 

[deanthedev]

It really wasn’t. It was a proof of concept. As I said, it didn’t become better than everything else on the market until the 3G and iphoneOS 2.0.

Sorry, it was. Prada was inferior. No gestures, no multitouch. Something as simple as scrolling requires tapping on a scroll bar or buttons. No keyboard. Yup, you actually had to type using the on-screen keypad by pressing number keys in various combinations to get the letter you want. Just like your old feature phone with mechanical keypad. Had a useless web browser and Adobe Flash UI. No WiFi. Smaller lower res screen. Far less storage, even using the slower SD card slot.

You want me to go on? Some of us also used and remember the Prada. It only looked good to someone who never tried the iPhone. Side-by-side it became obvious how inferior it was.

To top it off, LG actually wanted more money for this inferior phone.

 

[adnbek]

LG KE850 was announced and released before the first iPhone 2G. Even before then I was using Compaq iPAQ PDA that was the forefather to smartphones.

Yup! My friend had one.

LG Electronics has stated the iPhone's design and concept was copied from the first LG Prada, the KE850. Woo-Young Kwak, head of LG Mobile Handset R&D Center, said at a press conference, “We consider that Apple copied the Prada phone after the design was unveiled when it was presented in the iF Design Award and won the prize in September 2006. We take that to mean Apple stole our idea.”[9] The KE850 received a 2007 iF product design award,[10] where entries had to be shipped by September 2006.

Apple had been working on the iPhone for years prior to its unveiling in January 2007. Unless you think after September 2006 it scrapped everything and spent the last 3 months before its reveal feverishly redesigning it to look like the Prada?

 

[kdarling]

Its worth remembering that pre-iPhone, Android was going to be button/joypad driven (remember the mini-trackball that was a feature of the first couple of generations of Android phones?)

No, the joypads were optional additional input methods for touch devices. (And frankly, ones that I still miss because they make perfect sense with big screens. With an optical one, it was super easy to scroll large lists with tiny thumb movements, vs trying to flick scroll.)

Android was originally intended to compete with Windows Mobile (and to a smaller extent, Symbian).

Google was worried that Microsoft would block out Google Search in the mobile market. That's why they wanted to put out a competing free and open mobile OS, and that's why Android was always intended to come in both a non-touch and touch version, just like Windows Mobile.

That's why there were two versions in the works, the non-touch Sooner which could be developed on at the time because it was the same as a known Windows Mobile phone:

And the touchscreen based Dream, whose hardware HTC was still working on.

(Qualcomm was shopping around a capacitive touchsceen chip at the time, because, as I've already pointed out, it was widely predicted in the industry that such was the way going forward.

That's why Jobs uncharacteristically revealed his secret iPhone six months ahead of time, using demo units that barely worked for more than a few minutes at a time. He was worried that the Barcelona show a couple of weeks later would have lots of iPhone-like devices, and he didn't want to be seen as the follower. As it turned out, he need not have worried. Most phone makers were still moving slowly.)

Look closely, though and you'll see that its just a few apps using touch to scroll and manipulate graphics (Maps, browser, globe demo) - the primary OS UI, though, is using some sort of off-screen control. Look at e.g. around 3:45 when he pops up a menu, and then scrolls the "coverflow-style" history display, or 4:40 when he launches Maps. At 4:41 you can just see "1: Previous; 3: Next" on the bottom of the screen! No finger-friendly menus or app launching in evidence.

On the contrary, there were of course touch menus, but those numbers were handy additional options that worked for touchscreen phones which also had a keypad available, perhaps via slideout.

In this case, the numbers were keypad shortcuts to move the map between Google Search results, without having to go back to the results and touch the next or previous one. I found them very handy on my first touchscreen Android phones that also had a keypad available. In fact, when they went away, I was pretty disappointed.

Touchscreens are not always the best input method for every situation.

For instance, it's always cracked me up that Jobs made a big deal about how physical keyboards took up half the frontal phone space, yet ignored the fact that a software one still took up half the frontal display space... whereas a slider keyboard was the best of both worlds, leaving the full display available.

 

[theluggage]

On the contrary, there were of course touch menus

...by the time the Dream was actually launched - over a year after the iPhone - yes.

But not, evidently, when Google made that video in November 2007: despite the second prototype shown clearly having a capacitative touchscreen, it is as clear as day that everything apart from scrolling around is being done with offscreen keys and wheels, and that the menus are far to small to be "finger friendly".

whereas a slider keyboard was the best of both worlds, leaving the full display available.

...making the phone twice as thick, and also muddying the UI design. The key to the iPhone UI was that it was designed from the ground up for a device that only had a touch screen - so while, yeah, the on-screen keyboard took up 1/2 the screen, everything was designed and tested with that in mind, so you never found yourself being forced to slide out the keyboard because the on-screen kb covered the input box...

I had a HTC TyTN (T-Mobile MDA Vario II) Windows Mobile phone - which had a slide out keyboard, a (resistive) touchscreen, a stylus, a jog wheel, a joypad and umpteen other buttons dotted around... and you needed every last one of them because none of the software had been optimised for a particular UI.

That's my point - not that capacitative touchscreens weren't coming, but that the distinguishing feature of the iPhone was the decision to just have a touchscreen and make darn sure every part of the OS worked well on it. (Back in those days, courage was real courage) The iPhone's on-screen keyboard was actually pretty amazing for anybody who had used an earlier on-screen KB.

 

[FFR]

lol at whoever is comparing the lg Prada to the first iPhone.
I have both no comparison

 

[FFR]

I'm 37, and I owned an LG that had the same if not slightly smaller form factor and layout as the original iPhone 2 months before it came out.
It was called the Prada.

Also? This:

You mean this candy bar slider dumb phone.

It didn’t even have Androïd.

 

[FFR]

I think the iPhone had a bigger influence on how these devices are interacted with more than the actual physical look of the device. I believe that the shape and increased screen size was where smartphones were naturally progressing as the technology became readily available to produce such devices - regardless if the iPhone was released or not. Case in point, the LG Prada which was released before the iPhone.

That dumb phone came out 2 months before the original iPhone.
It had a tiny capacitive screen no multitouch and wasn’t a smartphone.

I know I had one.
Oh and it likes nothing like an iPhone just look at the dimensions.

 

[FFR]

No, the joypads were optional additional input methods for touch devices. (And frankly, ones that I still miss because they make perfect sense with big screens. With an optical one, it was super easy to scroll large lists with tiny thumb movements, vs trying to flick scroll.)

Android was originally intended to compete with Windows Mobile (and to a smaller extent, Symbian).

Google was worried that Microsoft would block out Google Search in the mobile market. That's why they wanted to put out a competing free and open mobile OS, and that's why Android was always intended to come in both a non-touch and touch version, just like Windows Mobile.

That's why there were two versions in the works, the non-touch Sooner which could be developed on at the time because it was the same as a known Windows Mobile phone:

And the touchscreen based Dream, whose hardware HTC was still working on.

(Qualcomm was shopping around a capacitive touchsceen chip at the time, because, as I've already pointed out, it was widely predicted in the industry that such was the way going forward.

That's why Jobs uncharacteristically revealed his secret iPhone six months ahead of time, using demo units that barely worked for more than a few minutes at a time. He was worried that the Barcelona show a couple of weeks later would have lots of iPhone-like devices, and he didn't want to be seen as the follower. As it turned out, he need not have worried. Most phone makers were still moving slowly.)



On the contrary, there were of course touch menus, but those numbers were handy additional options that worked for touchscreen phones which also had a keypad available, perhaps via slideout.

In this case, the numbers were keypad shortcuts to move the map between Google Search results, without having to go back to the results and touch the next or previous one. I found them very handy on my first touchscreen Android phones that also had a keypad available. In fact, when they went away, I was pretty disappointed.

Touchscreens are not always the best input method for every situation.

For instance, it's always cracked me up that Jobs made a big deal about how physical keyboards took up half the frontal phone space, yet ignored the fact that a software one still took up half the frontal display space... whereas a slider keyboard was the best of both worlds, leaving the full display available.

If there were two versions they would have released both versions.

The blackberry/blackjack clone was abandoned and they started over, well not completely...they kept the trackball.

Hell the first android phone didn’t even support a virtual keyboard until android 1.5.