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See this. Other companies do concepts that get a lot of press and go nowhere; Apple keeps quiet until they have actual products to announce.

I love it how ACs come in here and try to re-write history.

It's not just ACs that "rewrite history"; I was using SPB Mobile Shell with widgets and grids of icons on a Samsung 830w back in Feb 2007 - well before the iPhone was released. Worked great, too - configurable, easy access, and even had a slide-out keyboard similar to the Blackberry phones.

As far as I can tell and remember, the iPhone was little more than a pretty feature phone - no apps (I was a regular user of Handango back then, plenty of apps for the WM platform), no Exchange support, no cut-and-paste, no multitasking, little more than what most LG and Samsung and Nokia feature phones offered. And considerably less functionality than the Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones offered.

But it looked pretty, and Apple is great at marketing...

I love it how ACs come in here and try to re-write history.

oh well a registered account, do you feel special? your link ignores everything prior to 2007 but just so you know the world did exist before the iphone.
were apple first with a touchscreen phone? No.
were apple first with a grid of icons on a touchscreen phone? No.
were apple first with apps on a touchscreen phone? No.

I can see you have difficulty believing that such things existed before 2007 and that these 'magical' things could not have been invented by anyone but apple, but samsung didn't 'steal' any ideas any more than apple 'stole' those ideas, you can't have it both ways.
I like apple, and i like most of their products, but i hate douchebags who act as if apple are the inventors of everything its ok when apple takes ideas from others but not when others take ideas from apple.

Samsung didn't copy Apple any more than Apple copied a whole bunch of previous products. Samsung has definitely improved on what Apple has done and that is why Apple is feeling threatened. I'm not sure I agree.

I love it how ACs come in here and try to re-write history.

Seriously, the volume of venom and vitriol whenever Apple does ANYTHING is ridiculous. There are a dozen handset and tablet makers whom Apple is not suing for anything, and their actions haven't stopped a bazillion Android activations per day. They're clearly not stifling competition.

This business seems like dancing in a mosh pit, and Apple's right in the middle. There's a lot of incidental contact, and Apple's not doing anything because they don't have any basis, and they're bumping some other guys pretty good themselves. But if you've ever been in a mosh pit and seen that one asshole who keeps throwing an elbow whenever you go by him... that's what Apple thinks of Samsung. Of course they're going to try to jump them in the parking lot.

Right. This isn't about all the also-rans copying Apple's work at all, is it?

While I totally agree that Samsung tried very, very hard to have the Galaxy phone and its UI look as much as an iPhone as possible, it's totally hopeless to sue them.

I mean, they're black rectangles with rounded corners and colorful icons in a grid on the screen. Still, others managed to give their phone a design that doesn't cry "iPhone!" to everyone, asking or not. What Samsung did was totally uncreative and somewhat shameless, but not illegal.

Anyway: This is in no way subtle or random chance.

I was facepalming over this until I saw some side by sides linked from Daring Fireball.

Sauce 1

Sauce 2.

I didn't give a shit until I saw the dock ripoff on the Samsung devices. that's just fuggin' blatant.

Yeah, I'm sure that's the only similarity, as opposed to a choice quote pulled by the summary from an article which pulled it from a court document which it failed to link. Clearly, most of the phones these days were independently conceived, which is why Apple entered a market that was already filled with innovative designs when the iPhone debuted in 2007, of which it is merely one among many now.

Oh, wait.

Now that I've paid my dues as an Apple fanboy, let me step back for a sec and be more reasonable, because as much as I like Apple, I love comprehensively well designed products better, regardless of where they come from or whose logo is on them. Here's what I really think about it all:
1) There should be protections for inventions and new ideas, allowing the originators to profit from them for a time.
2) Apple came up with something new and disruptive when the iPhone debuted, and again when the iPad debuted.
3) While Apple does deserve to make a profit, they don't deserve a free ride. There still needs to be competition when you have technologies that so thoroughly disrupt an industry, otherwise you run the risk of them dominating and stagnating, which is bad for everyone.
4) Allowing blatant rip offs defeats the purpose of #1 and isn't conducive to encouraging innovation. It discourages it by sending the wrong message.

So, basically...I dunno. The summary doesn't link to any primary sources, such as the court documents where your quote was pulled from, so I can't make any judgment calls about the merit of the case as a whole, nor should anyone else. If their case rests on arguments that flimsy however, then it's just another frivolous lawsuit in a long list of frivolous lawsuits from the companies involved in all of this fracas. If they have a stronger case than that, then I might be willing to support it, but I find it doubtful.

Still though, you can't help but feel a twinge when you see where phones were in 2006 and 2007, see where they are now, see when the change happened and what form it took, and know that the group responsible for the change is supposed to take it well or else get lambasted by people the world over as bullying. I know I'd be angry if I came up with a design that impacted an industry as much as the iPhone did, only to have every product in the industry look like what I had come up with just a year or two later. And since people are so prone to forget, you'll hear them saying, "Well, duh. That's obvious. How else would it be?" when talking about innovation after it happens, completely forgetting that a mere 3-4 years prior there was no product that resembled what every product looks like today.