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Google Warned Samsung Galaxy Tab Was "Too Similar"
tlhIngan writes "Some interesting news has come out of Apple's filings against Samsung. First, Google warned Samsung that their 'P1' (Galaxy Tab) and 'P3' (Galaxy Tab 10.1) tablets were 'too similar' to the iPad. In addition, Samsung's own Product Design Group note it was 'regrettable' that the Galaxy S 'looks similar' to the iPhone. Finally, how designers at a Samsung-sponsored evaluation noted the Galaxy S 'copied the iPhone too much' and 'innovation is needed.' Of course, Samsung has some ammunition of its own, including how Apple copied Sony's designs. In unrelated news, Judge Grewal has sanctioned Samsung for not preserving emails from automatic deletion, even after litigation has begun."
Again and again and again.... Cant we just move on? Its an electronic tablet its going to be similar cause well its a tablet. I'm sick of this shit anyone else?
There were featureless rounded corner rectangle tablets before the iPad.
There were touchscreen driven grid of icons phone user interfaces before it iPhone.
Apparently the slide to unlock is so obvious that Apple have to publicly apologise for claiming otherwise.
They're similar because it's an obvious idea which had been done before.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
My Samsung 40" television looks exactly like a 40" Sony television. My LG washing machine and dryer looks suspiciously similar to a washing machine and dryer from Kenmore. And my Starbucks coffee tureen is the spitting image of the one I have from Seattle's Best! When you are talking about devices that perform similar tasks, they are going to look alike.
There's only so many ways to build a computer, and when you're trying to stuff as many electronics in a slender LCD screen as you can, it's probably going to look like a plastic slab.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
that's because seatle's best is owned by starbucks. they are a wholesale brand of starbucks
Those bastards! Next thing you know, someone going to start building phones based on Linux!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
for copying the TC1000:
http://pencomputing.com/frames/tpc_compaq.html
- Silver and black
- rounded corners
- screen takes up almost entire front surface
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
It also looks like ones I've seen from Peets, from Jittery Joes, and from McDonalds. My point is that there's only so many ways to make a coffee mug.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
It's not just rounded corners.
As the summary and article state plainly, Samsung made what amounts to a copy of the iPad. If you have difficulty telling the products apart after covering up the brand logos, then they are too similar. It's that simple. From there, it's not a large leap for the original manufacturer to claim the subsequent manufacturer was riding on the firsts success. Hell, didn't that exactly happen in court a few months ago? Samsung's lawyer was asked to tell the court which tablet was which, and he couldn't.
And when that original manufacturer happens to be Apple... well... That's like pissing off someone high on bath salts and PCP, and then crying foul because they start beating the crap out of you and eating your face.
There are SO many ways that Samsung could have differentiated their products, but they chose to make it as similar to the iPad as they thought they could get away with. Other manufacturers havn't had any difficulty doing so. There are tablets in various colours, with textured non-slip backs, varying kinds of frontal designs. There were an almost limitless number of ways Samsung could have avoided this right from there start. But they chose not to. And now they're paying the price.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Apart from LG who announced this blatant iPhone ripoff in December 2006, a month before the first iPhone was announced.
Feel free to not buy from them. Other consumers clearly disagree with you, and so does the competition, which is selling products at the same price.
What competition? What features? What performance?
Apple is pretty open about their business practices. What exactly is it that you don't trust about them? You may dislike their business practices, but that doesn't mean they can't be trusted.
Regarding the rest of your comment, can you provide evidence regarding that slave labor, lack of environmental concerns, and litigious scams you talk about? Do you even know what you're talking about? Are you aware that it has been shown that none of that is actually true? Please provide evidence so that I can provide counter-evidence.
You're not really so much of an apple fanboi that the idea of rounded edges is something you really attribute to apple, are you?
If you look at e clamshell phones, how many look like the razr? One.
How about the candy bar phones? They look similar, but different no manufacturer wants users to confuse their phones with someone elses.
Look at Samsung. They want their stuff to look like Apple's because it helps them sell. Period. In the documents they say as much.
People here freak out when a developer copies another developer's game...but when Samsung and google copy Apple people are like "oh, there's only one way to do it so we have to copy apple."
How fucking lame is that?
Not quite.
Samsung's alternative options cost HALF of what the Apple version does. That is, I can choose a different set of tradeoffs and spend less. It's rather similar to how I use ION nettops in the place of Mac Minis.
A diversity of options is nice this way. I get what I want rather than the singular package deal that some monopoly wannabe wants to offer me.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Kenmore appliances are just rebranded appliances made by other manufacturers, including LG. That Kenmore washing machine looks like an LG and vice versa because very likely they are the same model with some slight enhancements.
But they did.
From TFA: http://allthingsd.com/files/2012/07/samsung_designs.jpg
You'll see there that, prior to the announcement of the iphone, Samsung had produce many bar-touchscreen designs. The iphone is similar to some of them, (since they were first), while some are more obviously just ancestors of the Galaxy S. Models like the Slide and F700 (of which I had one, prior to the announcement of the iphone) very obviously evolved into the Galaxy S.
A great comparison is the car market. In Australia, there are arguments amongst car enthusiasts (see: Bogans) about which is better between the (Ford) Falcon and the (Holden) Commodore. Both 'camps' are just as one-eyed and ranting mad as the Apple vs Samsung camps. (And in both situations, I look at them and think "WTF? It's just a car/phone" and get a completely different brand so that I don't have to be tarred with the same brush. (Hell, I'm using a frickin' SONY atm to avoid those two!
In the late 70s and early 80s, both the Falcon/Fairmont and the Commodore/Calais had the typical 'boxy' look of a 70s car.
Suddenly 1988 came around and both companies took the evolutionary process of gasp Rounding the corners! at the same time, with the 1988 Falcon and Commodore getting the same rounded, streamlined look.
I'm sorry, but while I still have a deep-seated sympathy for Apple from the days when they were the underdog vs MS, in this case they are abusing process and being vexatious over a very logical and common design evolution.
which is selling products at the same price.
This is disingenuous, because it says nothing about what you're actually *buying* for that price. If an iPad is $500 worth of hardware in a $700 package, and a Galaxy Tab is $600 worth of hardware in a $700 package, then it really doesn't matter that they're the same price; the Galaxy Tab is the better deal, all other things considered.
But then, IMO, anyone spending $500+ on a toy that's going to be mostly collecting dust and then worthless in a year or two is a moron IMO. Google finally got the price point right with the Nexus tablet.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
That's the beautiful thing about capitalism and the free market.
The peasantry is in control rather than a few Robber Barons.
With all due respect, you are just flat wrong. Laissez-faire Capitalism puts control primarily in the hands of the people who have the wealth (AKA "capital"). I assume you are referring to the United States. In this country the "peasantry" doesn't have much of a voice because we do not have a real democracy. Some may say we have a Republic but I think it's closer to an Oligarchy at this point. Here the most wealthy 1% control 35.6% of the wealth while the top 10% control 75% of it. The Forbes Top 400 has a combined wealth of $1.37 trillion dollars. That's who is primarily in control not the "peasantry".
We'll make great pets
Which doesn't really look that similar to the first generation iPhone apart from the fact that it is a rectangular touch screen phone. It doesn't have a curved metal back like the first gen-iPhone, doesn't have similar side buttons, doesn't have a similar front panel design. The side and back appearance of the two phones are night and day different. The experience when turning on and interacting with the device is not similar to the iPhone.
Of course, you're insinuating that Apple scrambled with one month before announcement and redid their entire design to rip off the Prada, which I'm taking from you involves redoing the iPhone to be a touch screen based product. And, of course, this was a blatant copy, but LG never bothered to sue.
Although it is an oft repeated meme on slashdot, Apple did not sue over a curved rectangular design. I know that you've read that here a number of times in highly moderated comments, but that doesn't make it the case. I also know that you've read a number of times that the iPhone was ripped off from the LG Prada, but if you look at front, back, and side profiles, plus screen shots of the GUI, it will be obvious that this wasn't the case.
What Apple sued Samsung for was the fact that the Galaxy lineup copied the iPhone experience as a whole - the appearance of the device beyond a simple front profile, the user interactions, the general feel of screen layouts and icons. Any of these items on their own wouldn't be worth suing over. It is the combination of all of these elements together to create a user experience that is essentially identical to the iPhone that Apple is suing over.
Of course, why wouldn't you make a comment about the iPhone copying the Prada, or Apple suing Samsung over black rounded rectangles? The first visible comment in any story mentioning these items is guaranteed a +5 mod.
Having the same specs is not the same as being equally functional. For one thing, you don't get OS X on a PC. Clearly that doesn't matter to you, but it does matter to some people.
Have you factored in resale value? For whatever reason, Apple products retain a great deal of value. I've always partially funded my new computer purchases with selling my old Apple hardware. I can get 30-40% of the purchase price of a new machine if I sell something 3 years old. So the fact that the new price is double isn't actually true if you're willing to sell after you feel that you're done with it.
Reliability? Tech support? Maybe you don't need them, but other people do. Apple's tech support consistently ranks at the top of the lists year after year.
Sure, the SPECS are the same, but I'm not convinced that the VALUE is the same.
Of course, you're insinuating that Apple scrambled with one month before announcement and redid their entire design to rip off the Prada, which I'm taking from you involves redoing the iPhone to be a touch screen based product. And, of course, this was a blatant copy, but LG never bothered to sue.
Your sarcasm detector must be broken, clearly grandparent is insinuating that there aren't many ways to design a touch screen phone. Which there aren't. So it follows that all touch screen phones look more or less alike.
Do you mean to compare a subsidized HTC Evo 4G to an unsubsidized iPhone 4S without even talking about the rest of the cost?
It looks to me as if the EVO 4G is $599.99 instead of your $300 which makes it a heck of a lot closer to the Apple 4 that is only only 519€ unlocked in France (couldn't find a price unlocked in the US).
Don't forget most reviews did give the upper hand to the iPhone 4 vs the EVO 4G so comparing it with an iPhone 4S is probably a bit of a stretch.
Geez, and they say Apple users are fanbois...
Write boring code, not shiny code!