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New iPhones, new Galaxies: Who's the Bigger Copycat? (yahoo.com)
David Pogue: Apparently, a lot of people hang their identities on what phones they carry. An iPhone person might feel personally affronted when a Samsung Galaxy gets a great review, and vice versa. Apple and Samsung just introduced their new fall 2018 smartphones, and it's clearer than ever: all smartphones have pretty much the same features. Therefore, it strikes many people as searingly important to remember which brand had those features first.
OS Features: Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it. The original 2007 iPhone brought us multitouch (pinch to zoom), an on-screen keyboard, auto-rotate, lists that scroll as though with momentum, and the apps-on-a-Home-page design that we all use to this day. Not surprisingly, then, Apple wins this category, having introduced 13 ideas, compared to Android's 10 (and Samsung's 1). The screen is the first thing you notice when you turn on a phone --how big, bright, and gorgeous it is. You can read the full review here. The final verdict: Apple leads the invention category, with 44 innovations, according to our calculations. Google's Android comes in second, with 31. And Samsung brings up the rear with 12 innovations. Now, if you count the number of times each company is listed as a Follower in the spreadsheet, you discover that Apple also seems to have stolen the most ideas. In part, that's because I'm pitting Apple against Google/Samsung (its phones use Google's software). As a result, no feature ever lists Google and Samsung as innovator+follower, or vice versa; they're always a single team.
OS Features: Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it. The original 2007 iPhone brought us multitouch (pinch to zoom), an on-screen keyboard, auto-rotate, lists that scroll as though with momentum, and the apps-on-a-Home-page design that we all use to this day. Not surprisingly, then, Apple wins this category, having introduced 13 ideas, compared to Android's 10 (and Samsung's 1). The screen is the first thing you notice when you turn on a phone --how big, bright, and gorgeous it is. You can read the full review here. The final verdict: Apple leads the invention category, with 44 innovations, according to our calculations. Google's Android comes in second, with 31. And Samsung brings up the rear with 12 innovations. Now, if you count the number of times each company is listed as a Follower in the spreadsheet, you discover that Apple also seems to have stolen the most ideas. In part, that's because I'm pitting Apple against Google/Samsung (its phones use Google's software). As a result, no feature ever lists Google and Samsung as innovator+follower, or vice versa; they're always a single team.
They both are still "innovating" things that were present in Nokia phones 10 years ago.
Brilliant.
95% of the hardware features on ALL smartphones over $200 are basically the same now. At this point it's really just a matter of what type/quality camera(s) you want that makes them different.
I think most of the readership here is aware that neither Apple nor Google/Samsung invented the multitouch screen. Those go back to 1982 at the University of Toronto. Engineering prototypes for multitouch phones outside of Apple before the iPhone. What Apple did was bring it to market first. Really, the article is cajoling us to think everyone else is hanging their identity on this stuff, and then giving it the shallow treatment and missing key history. At this point... this isn't worth our eyes.
Being the first to innovate can be great, being the first to get it right is often better (of course 'better' is a matter of opinion). Examples:
- Yahoo and Altavista were before Google with search engines, but Google got the better implementation and the rest are history
- Creative was before Apple with an MP3 player, but the iPod got the better formula
- Palm and Microsoft were before Apple with smart phones, but Apple changed the market when it brought out the first iPhone
- Microsoft was before Apple with the tablet, but the iPad also changed the market and made them appealing
Being first mover is great if you can keep enough of a lead, but sometimes second mover has the advantage of learning the lessons of the first mover without having to invest the same initial amount to get market validation.
As a a buyer of technology, seeing your favourite company bring out something new is cool, but seeing them making it feel natural and not a fight is even better.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
As long as a phone as the features you want, what difference does it make which phone had them first, or how they ended up on your phone?
People who care about this kind of stuff...I mean...honestly. It's just the technonerd version of "My dad can beat up your dad."
Cadillac had the first electric starter and ignition. Thomas Jefferson invented the dumbwaiter and iron plow. And, of course, Apple gets negative points for the Newton.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"An iPhone person might feel personally affronted when a Samsung Galaxy gets a great review, and vice versa..."
Samsung Galaxy devices get personally affronted when iPhone users give them good reviews?
List of impressive smartphone innovations:
- Skyrocketing prices for marginal incremental improvement
- Devices costing $500-$1000 dollars lacking user replaceable batteries
- Removal of widely used physical interfaces for self-enrichment / courage
- Artificially low amounts of internal persistent storage completely out of whack with current technology coupled with refusal to provide SD expansion
- Crummy battery life
- Phones so thin they snap like graham crackers in your pockets
- Lack of usability / physical buttons
- eSIMs
- Locked bootloaders, operating systems and carriers
- Preloaded to the hilt with malware
Keep up the good work.
People who get hung up on what phone they are carrying are usually people who are least likely to afford an iPhone. I know several people working minimum wage jobs in Silicon Valley who are ordering the iPhone XS MAX 512GB for $350 down and $46 per month. They would be better off financially by buying a pre-owned iPhone 7 outright for $288.
Says the person supporting Apple who's "innovations" (rectangular shape, rounded corners) were in clay styluses used by Egyptians over a thousand years ago.
Also, most, if not all of those "features" were in tablets before they were put into phones.
Touch screens were around for over a decade before Apple "invented" them.
Most of Apple's other product designs were stolen, some from Braun products from the 60s.
https://www.cultofmac.com/188753/the-braun-products-that-inspired-apples-iconic-designs-gallery/
Even accepted by the late Steve Jobs that the mouse was copied from Xerox company.
Touch screen was introduced by Palm OS years before iPhone came out and was probably copied by Steve Jobs too albeit extending its touch features without a stylus pen.
"Innovation" is too strong a word for many of these features. "Market testing" may be a better word: who market-tested them in practice first. For example, "slow motion" existed on analog cameras and projectors before electronic computers even existed. (And on dedicated digital cameras.) Implementing it in a smart-phone may be a lot of detail-oriented programming to get the necessary processing efficiency, but it doesn't take a breakthrough: any competent programmer with sufficient time can implement it.
The issue is it's hard to know what will resonate with consumers. The article lists some "failed" features as examples. A daft company will happily let competitors make their costumers be the guinea pigs if either the implementation is expensive or if their own market specialists estimate the demand for the feature is too weak or too hard to gauge.
Smart businesses dump marketing risk and cost onto others. Microsoft was a master of that, not just by "stealing", but often by purchasing small companies with a trending product. It's why Gates is one of the richest persons in the world.
Table-ized A.I.
yeah but did those ignorant primitives have a NOTCH in their tabllets? Huh? No they did not! We're the true innovators now, they just had a near miss back then
Touch screen was invented in 1965 for radar traffic control applications by Eric Johnson in the Royal Radar Establishment
Not in vain are they made by companies on fire.
If you reduce things to their simplest, then everything is a copy.
If what Apple did was so simple and obvious, why did nobody do it before them? Why did it take them several years of R&D to get it done, even in the incomplete way that the original iPhone presented? No third party apps, couldn't even copy and paste, no 3G data, etc.
Perhaps it only becomes simple and obvious once someone has done it and it's now clear how god damn terrible the devices that came before were? Remember, in 2007, Android was a Blackberry knock-off until the iPhone was displayed at Macworld SF in January. Then all of a sudden they ditched the hardware keyboard and moved in the direction that every phone is today.
If it's so obvious and easy, how is it that the Android team missed the mark too, with a big fat head start?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
After watching the poor build quanlity on apple mac books I wouldn't go near an iphone
https://www.youtube.com/user/r...
A lot of the apple stuff comes across more as "look at me I have an apple"
Phone wars are just stupid, mmmkay?
The smartphone in general is a pretty remarkable technological marvel. Let the lawyers split hairs over who did what first.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
An iPhone person might feel personally affronted when a Samsung Galaxy gets a great review, and vice versa
Come on. NO ONE feels like this in reality. At worse you might get trolls in the comments for good reviews of one or the other, but it real life an iPhone user gives exactly 0 fucks about a good review for any Android phone, and vice-versa.
Now you might get annoyed by a review that gets wrong something about a phone you actually use, that just makes sense.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Pretty sure Nokia would be in business had they not been bought, and then shuttered, by Microsoft.
Unlikely. Nokia was already suffering from a bunch of self inflicted wounds before they got in bed with Microsoft. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that Symbian or MeeGo would have gained meaningful traction in the market. They lost a march to Apple and Google in operating systems and never really caught up. Partnering with Microsoft wasn't in principle a terrible idea but it was horribly executed. If I had been a shareholder in either company I would have been incredibly angry. I've seen very few companies crap the bed quite as hard as Nokia did around 2008-2012.
Pretty sure they were doing fine until they became a victim of Microsoft trying to get into the phone industry.
No they were not. The moment the iPhone dropped Nokia's market share in smartphones started to fall and as Android picked up it just got worse. It's not clear whether they could have fended off iOS and Android but it was very clear that they were no longer "doing fine" even at the time.
They might have still managed somehow but once the Burning Platform memo was issued they basically announced publicly that their current products had no future while they had no replacement based on Microsoft's system ready to ship for a long time after that. It was one of the most insanely stupid blunders I've ever seen.
It's irrelevant who invented something first and whether somebody copied something or figured out something independently, unless a law is broken. Given that it takes a year to create a new phone the first on the market with something might not even be the first to start developing on it - like the notch which were developed simultaneously by two companies even though one put it on the market first.
It's like the "Opera did this 10 year ago, Firefox" thing; it doesn't matter. Whether they reinvented, were unknowingly inspired or blatantly copied - in the end it benefits the user.
Furthermore the whole Android vs. Apple circle jerk is a thoroughly dumb thing spearheaded by constipated insecure teens trying to validate their choices.
Lots of smart good people use iPhones and Android just like lots of dummies on either platform. Lots of people change between them multiple times, depending on deals.
Hating one company and being loyal to another is doing a disservice to yourself, they all want your money. Apple directly, Google monetizes your soul and Samsung is trying for both..
Base each new purchase on use case and budget and don't be an infantile: respect the choice of others.
Conceptually, this beat them both by about 7 years.
https://www.zdnet.com/product/handspring-visorphone/
The entire article is bullshit. It is assuming absolute stock OS with absolutely nothing installed on it, if my assumption is correct from some of these dates I'm reading. Google didn't want to entire step on the toes of all of their vendors and carriers which were implementing a ton of these features long before they were standardized and pushed upstream into the main Android OS. For instance, they list Android as getting "Voicemail Transcription" only this year. I can't remember ever having a phone WITHOUT this feature in the past 5+ years now. Google Voice has supported this feature I believe since day 1. Carriers such as T-Mobile have had "Visual Voicemail" as part of their package for several years too.
They also have an entire section on keyboard features. This is the same issue all over again. Android for a very long time has supported custom keyboards, and I don't think I've ever seen a non-Nexus/Pixel phone use the stock keyboard. All of those additional features have been available for quite some time before they say they became available. On top of this, other features are not mentioned. Things like swype keyboard support are entire absent from this article as to give the appearance that Apple has the more innovative feature set. Yeah, its easy to pick them as the winner when you purposefully ignore things Android did years before Apple.
"If what Apple did was so simple and obvious, why did nobody do it before them?"
I really think it was coming anyway. The pieces had been building up to it for years. I had a windows mobile/ winCE ? i don't recall the branding at the time; but it was a touchscreen device, with a stylus and slideout keyboard before the iphone.
Honestly, i think apple's big hit was in large part precisely because they weren't tethered to backwards compatibility; and built the os and apps for the device, and there was no one saying ... well it needs to run "Excel and Word Mobile 2000" or whatever...
Likewise, blackberry was chasing the enterprise, the devices only worked with BES, and they didn't think the consumer market existed. And likewise their OS was too tied up with their legacy compatibility needs to make a fresh start.
Apple came in with a product that couldn't do any of the enterprise stuff; it was basically a web browser, phone, contacts, calendar, and an ipod. it didn't have real apps, didn't do enteprise security / policy, etc... but since apple never had any of that history that consumers would expect them to support they didn't need to figure out a way of moving that forward, that gave them a lot more freedom and agility to make a good product.
I think without apple the other guys would have gotten there anyway. Things were already heading in that direction, but apple was a lot more nimble because they weren't hauling legacy boat anchors of existing code.
(And Motorola was just caught with its pants down; they had a terrific series of products .. from the starTAC through the TimePort to the Razr ... they were doing fine, and just didn't see the smartphone revolution coming until it was too late.)
It is imortant to remember A-Og developed Hammer before S-Og!
A-Og Obsidan hammer superior to S-Og Basalt hammer because it shiny!
Don't drop A-Og hammer or it will shatter!
If what Apple did was so simple and obvious, why did nobody do it before them? Why did it take them several years of R&D to get it done, even in the incomplete way that the original iPhone presented? No third party apps, couldn't even copy and paste, no 3G data, etc.
Even the first iPhone was a copy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you consider the difference in available display, battery, and radio technology, the Simon was actually more advanced (in 1994/1995) than the iPhone was in 2007. It had expandable storage, the ability to run 3rd-party applications (through download or with a card), and had a touchscreen that changed depending on which application was running.
Apple did a lot of work to make their copy work better and look nicer. They had a few advantages with an extra 13 years of advancement in the electronics industry. They also did an excellent job of making the whole package work for the customer - phone, unlimited use plans, lots of hand-holding with their service plans, etc.
Don't think they were the first though. They weren't first in most areas. They made a business of identifying good ideas and making them look nice. They have done very well with that model.
Kind of like the old saying: "the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese"
- The Sigless Wonder
(...) Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it. (...)
No they didn't. They did something else entirely, but it's so invisible that apparently nobody thinks of it. We had touchscreen smartphones well before the iPhone came out. And if you leave out the phone, we already had a comparable feature set back in 2000 with devices like the Sony Clie. None of that was revolutionary. What WAS revolutionary about the iPhone was the introduction of App Store (with the iPhone 3G). That's what made the iPhone the success it is and created the ecosystem needed to sustain it. They also introduced the iPhone at exactly the right time w.r.t. the state of battery, touchscreen and networking technology and Internet penetration. So if you're going to give credit to Apple for their inventions (which they deserve - don't get me wrong), let's do it for the right reasons: The App Store and perfect timing. The rest is just high-quality copy-catting.
0x or or snor perron?!
If what Apple did was so simple and obvious, why did nobody do it before them?
There were two driving factors to answer your question.
First, the cost of implementing those features would make the device too expensive for their target audience. Apple's R&D was negotiating better pricing.
And second, battery life! BlackBerry had a smartphone that ran JAVA apps and went a full week on a charge. Apple gambled that their New Shiny would tempt people into giving up their battery life. The bet paid off.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
>"Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it."
"As we know it?"
That is quite a disclaimer. Palm and others had very functional touch screens for a long time before Apple had any phone at all. Of course, they were resistive and not capacitive. But I read all the time in the media how Apple invented the smart phone, which is absolutely and totally false. And how Apple invented the touchscreen phone, which is equally false.
But since Apple tried for years to say that large screen phones are stupid and people don't want them, let's give them credit for inventing such wonderful things as:
* Walled garden app infrastructures
* Non-replaceable batteries
* Elimination of convenient and universal headphone jacks
* Stupid screen notches
* Non-standard charging ports
* A single button trying to do 20 things
* Thin at the expense of battery life
* Requiring cases to have a hole to ensure the Apple logo is always visible, because, you know, everyone has to know you have a "real" phone.
I keep seeing things listed after such and such date, but then confused....because well, I had such Samsung phones with such earlier.
a) I think this guy did not do diligence in his research.
b) Simply counting Samsung and Google and ignoring ALL other androids is ludicrous. Keep it Android vs iOS.
******
Also not included: Features that existed before the smartphone era, like downloadable ringtones. They weren’t Apple’s, Samsung’s, or Google’s ideas in the first place.
My Palm IIIe Palm Pilot
> an on-screen keyboard
> the apps-on-a-Home-page design that we all use to this day
My HTC Pocket PC Phone
> an on-screen keyboard
> auto-rotate
> apps-on-a-Home-page design
I guess I can give Apple ""lists that scroll as though with momentum"
They showed the market that ordinary folks would spend a $1,000 for a phone. The iPhone was $500 after the subsidy from a 2 year contract.
2006 - Blackberry 8700, $299 with contract
2006 - BlackBerry Pearl $199 with contract.
2006 - Palm Treo 680 $199 with contract
2006 - HTC's Pocket PC phones were around $250-$350 with contract, and they usually dropped significantly in price after 6 months
You see, Apple's biggest innovation was proving that consumers would pay the $500+ for a phone. It wasn't that other companies could not offer a phone with a bigger screen, etc. They just figured no one would pay those prices for a phone.
Most of Apple's other product designs were stolen, some from Braun products from the 60s.
https://www.cultofmac.com/188753/the-braun-products-that-inspired-apples-iconic-designs-gallery/
Funny how the Braun designer sides with Apple, ehh? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/te... -- https://www.fastcompany.com/30...
Especially against Samsung http://www.idownloadblog.com/2...
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
If what Apple did was so simple and obvious, why did nobody do it before them?
There were two driving factors to answer your question. First, the cost of implementing those features would make the device too expensive for their target audience. Apple's R&D was negotiating better pricing.
So the success of Apple is only due to the fact that every other company has the deal making abilities of Donald Trump?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.