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Apple, Samsung Settle After Fighting Seven Years in Court (bloomberg.com)
Apple and Samsung reached a settlement in their U.S. patent battle, putting an end to a seven-year fight over smartphone designs. From a report: The string of lawsuits started in 2011 when Apple sued Samsung for allegedly copying the design of the iPhone in the creation of its own line of smartphones. Terms of the accord weren't immediately disclosed. The settlement follows a damages retrial in which Apple won a $539 million jury award in May.
for all the lawyers involved.
Apple sued Samsung for allegedly copying the design of the iPhone in the creation of its own line of smartphones
Samsung was making smartphones back in 2001, when Apple was trying to figure out how to copy Creative's MP3 player. Apple may have complained about Samsung copying the iPhone for a later line of smartphones, but Samsung was one of the early pioneers in the smartphone space, well before Apple even thought about getting into the space.
So Samsung has been making mobile phones for a while. What the hell does that have to do with anything? I remember the original Samsung smartphones. They were so similar to the 1-3G iPhones I inadvertently walked off with a Samsung phone a couple of times when I mistook one for my iPhone 3G. Here's a graphic that kind of says it all: http://allthingsd.com/files/20... I saw one of the first Android prototypes too. It was a half screen and half keyboard affair that was clearly meant to be a Blackberry killer. Nobody took Apple seriously as a phone manufacturer, they all figured Apple would bring out some kind of glorified iPod with a keypad. When the iPhone hit the market everybody went back to the drawing board and the next thing you know they're all, by some cosmic coincidence, selling phones that look like more or less exactly like the iPhone. But of course none of them copied what Apple was doing ... perish the thought.
I still haven't seen any smartphones with sharp corners.
Lots of Sony smartphones have square corners.
FYI, the center pic in your link should be of an LG Prada, not an iPhone. The Prada was the first smartphone to go without a keyboard or keypad, not the iPhone. As I keep telling people, just because the first time you saw a feature was on an Apple product, does not mean Apple invented it.
The pics on the left and right are also cherry-picked to make it look like the iPhone was the progenitor of the modern smartphone design. Here's what the pic looks like if you cherry-pick phones to make the comparison favorable to Samsung.
Samsung already had phones in their internal design pipeline prior to the iPhone's release which looked very iPhone-like. They just weren't allowed to present them in court because they missed a filing deadline. The judge in the case opted to prioritize a legal deadline over the truth, which makes sense if a lawyer is exhibiting a pattern of missing deadlines, but not when potentially a billion dollars is at stake. The truth is the industry was already transitioning towards touch and away from physical keyboards by the time the iPhone rolled out. The iPhone did not create this new paradigm, it just happened to make the biggest splash with it.
Samsung missed no deadlines in the similar case over the iPad's design. So they were able to successfully argue that the concept of a tablet existed long before the iPad, and that the Samsung Galaxy Tab's design actually borrowed from their digital picture frame which pre-dates the iPad (and the iPhone for that matter). And the jury ruled for Samsung in the tablet design patent case. They weren't jerks about it either - they didn't sue Apple for stealing their picture frame design for the iPad.
Not at all. Apple protected its IP and patents. Samsung lost and had to come begging for a settlement. The fact is they outright copied someone's design. Every Android phone is a just a pale copy of iOS now. Eat it.
Samsung has held a large chunk of the smartphone market since 1999. Their recent increase in their market share (2008-2013) coincides with Nokia's demise.
When the iPhone hit the market everybody went back to the drawing board and the next thing you know they're all, by some cosmic coincidence, selling phones that look like more or less exactly like the iPhone. But of course none of them copied what Apple was doing ... perish the thought.
Don't get into ANY argument with LynwoodRooster or BronsCon on ANY Apple subject. They will simply supply circular logic in post after post until you give up in exasperation.
Then they will feel like they have "won", when all they have actually done is wear you out; because they both seem to have nothing better to do than debate on Slashdot All. Day. Long.