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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."
"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/
Touch screen was invented in 1965 for radar traffic control applications by Eric Johnson in the Royal Radar Establishment
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.
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.