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Galaxy Nexus Designed To Avoid Infringing Apple Patents
An anonymous reader writes with an except from an article on Geek.com about the Galaxy Nexus: "Samsung has been on the receiving end of many an Apple lawsuit in recent months, and in some cases a ban on selling its products. The Galaxy Nexus smartphone, which was unveiled last night, could also come under close scrutiny in the courts once Apple takes a look at it. But unlike previous Samsung Android devices, the chances of that happening are apparently going to be diminished or even non-existent. Shin Jong-kyun, the president of Samsung's mobile division, admitted yesterday that the Galaxy Nexus has been developed taking into account Apple's patents."
They released a picture of it. Looks pretty sweet.
But it may still infringe on Apple's "Physical object with an ability to dial a number" patent.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yay! Proof positive that patents encourage innovation.
And who knows, while Samsung work to avoid IP pitfalls they may have (and likely have done) developed their own technology and patents which could trip up Apple in the long run.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
TFA says "dubbed by media as Google and Samsung's answer to the iPhone 4S". Not particularly accurate. From a tech point of view, the Galaxy SII was the answer to the 4S, and was released ahead of it. This is the next step.
From what I understand about how easily patents on extremely general ideas on technology, how can anyone know what design is going to infringe on a patent? I don't see how anyone can write a design specification with one of the ground rules being to not infringe on a specific company's patent.
How can you know how a given patent will be interpreted by a court?
Are they in effect admitting that their previous Android phones were ignoring Apple's patents? Samsung has not been doing themselves any favors recently, what with the "app wall" in their store display in Rome featuring icons from iOS, and the webpage for the Galaxy Player 50 (since removed) that showed a 2008 screenshot of the iPhone's Maps app.
If they wanted to be *really* clever, it wouldn't have any border at all. It'd be shaped like a fractal. :D
Patent that, bitches.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I wonder how much the bad PR accumulated from stupid patents hurts companies like Apple- or if it even feels any affect,
Don't say any public exposure is good exposure. Toyota found out that that was not the case when their cars decided they didn't want to stop.
When it comes time that I decide to buy a smart phone [as if I will ever have that much money :( ] I will weigh the pros and cons of each option; however, I won't deny- I have a bad taste in my mouth about apple so I may be less inclined to buy their product if I find it not to be too much better than a competitor... if Apple is way better than anyone else- I will overlook the minor inconvenience of their patent faux pas.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Why don't they put in a SD reader? That is one of the things I love about my Galaxy S and makes it a replacement for my MP3 player but without it I am thinking twice about getting this phone and making the Galaxy S II look a lot more appealing.
Not "the legal system." The legal system is the set of laws, the rules of the court and the judge. The legal system is likely to look dimly on that argument. You are, however, certainly correct that Apple's lawyers will make that argument. Hell, I probably would too.
I think the strong hand response would be to attack the validity of the patents. I believe that's what Samsung is doing in the EU.
-GiH
If companies suing each other over patent issues leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you might want to just abstain from using cellphones at all.
This is a year old (I had seen a more recent one, but can't find it now): http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/11/mobile-patent-lawsuits/
The first thing I notice is they've changed the phone icon from green to blue, which I'm sure is an attempt to avoid Apple's claims of trademark infringement. The color green has long been used to indicate placing a call, which is why Samsung changing the color from green to blue is such a good example of IP law being so stifling that companies have to intentionally avoid making anything remotely similar to another company's products. The problem is there's only so often you can do this before you run out of things to avoid.
Aside from the green phone icon, another example is Apple's claim that Samsung's yellow notepad icon infringes on its own yellow notepad icon. Yellow notepads are fairly common, yet for some strange reason it is wrong for Samsung to use the color yellow for its notepad icon. If all other companies acted the same, imagine the many different colors each company would have to avoid, like mines in a minefield.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Apple patented the idea of designing a device that does not infringe their patents.
So let me get this straight. Samsung is designing a device that specifically doesn't infringe on another company's patents. And this is news? Isn't that generally the goal of patents (at least when they're not terribly broken like they are)?
Also, they seem to have been ABLE to produce a phone that didn't rip off Apple's design (it looks pretty good actually), what was all this about "it's impossible not to make a phone exactly like Apple's" stuff that was floating around in their defense earlier?
Going to sell all the current Ones for $99.00 to dump all the ones already built? I'll take a couple!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In a circular box?
Anybody actually know what are the patents that Samsung is supposedly infringing on?
They need to get all its features ready for the 2013 model iPhone so they can claim them as own their invention, the same way the half assed iPhone update from 2 weeks back magically got the widgets and notifications Android has had from the start.
How is that not a fair agrument? Besides all that, every court that has reviewed the case has concluded that Samsung infringed on Apple's patents. It doesn't mater whether or not Samsung thinks they are infringing or not at this point.
Not functional patents. The basic issue is Samsung's blatant copying of Apple, and in doing so Samsung tripped over some of Apple's design patents.
Look at this image to get a good idea of the extent that Samsung has been riding Apple's coattails where the iPad is concerned. It paints a larger picture of willful copying that Apple can use to bolster the court case over the design patents.
All phones look pretty much the same these days in case you haven't noticed. A black rectangle with child-safe corners and a screen taking up most of the face. The only way the iPhone ever stands out is the silver edging, and the chrome back before that.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yay! Proof positive that patents encourage innovation.
And THAT, SIR, is the undisputed hallmark of excellent design.
Do NOT tread lightly to avoid stepping on the toes of others! Design yourself some new feet that fit between their toes instead!
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Apple has a design patent on the shape of the iPad. Read the article I linked. This is not a trademark issue, it is a patent issue.
Did they make it round with square corners?
Apple soon will patent the "device to enable communication between two (or more) people" itself =)
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Anybody who says just "rectangle with round corners" shows they don't know the case.
Uh, talkback, kickback, and soundback have been available on android for a while though they are marked as for more accessable usage for people with impairments.
Yes, but if they become such a giant it's just as bad... It would be better to hope that they all damage each other so much that some kind of sane regulation is imposed over this broken and trollish system.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Shin said that the past six months of lawsuits in which Samsung and Apple have filed numerous suits and countersuits was "just the start" of a long patent war, from which he sees no end in sight. ... Samsung added personnel to its legal team to ramp up the battle against Apple and plans to hire more lawyers, according to Shin. "(I realized that) having technological power and being business savvy aren't enough," he said.
How is this innovation? The patent system is encouraging companies to spend money on lawyers and lawsuits instead of engineers and technology. Instead of doing proper development, engineers have to waste their time making minor visual changes to a product line in the vague hope that someday a judge will find that these changes are significant enough to make a product "not infringing" of some random patent.
Using a global patent war to get a competitor's products banned outright is certainly an innovation in the competitive capitalist marketplace. And from a legal perspective, maybe corporate lawyers all over the world are now thinking, "yes, that's innovative! That's what we should be doing!".. But don't confuse this with technological innovation.
Having said that, it isn't even clear how the Galaxy Nexus design is supposed to avoid Apple's design patents - it is clearly still a phone with a glass screen and rounded corners, so I doubt Apple's legal team is going to back down.
If you design the interface of the phone and publish specs then they won't have to worry about software patents. Just ship the phones as a platform with basic functional software and let users put the "real" ported software on the phone, be it open source or a free binary blob.
Divorce the hardware from the software.
It shouldn't be necessary but it's the ecosystem that these corporations and their lawyers have done to the patent system.
Why would Samsung use a TI OMAP processor in the Galaxy Nexus when they have their own line of ARM SOCs?
Samsung is copying as much as possible to ride on Apple's coattails.