Quote:
Originally Posted by jjallenupthehill
I've been following this thread for a lot of posts, and I have to say that a lot of people seem to be missing the point. Either that or there is a lot of disingenuousness, ignorance or plain stupidity.
Let's be completely clear, Samsung obviously and shamelessly completely ripped off Apple. External design and interface, even the charger. Look at the design. You don't need any fancy arguments to see what is plainly in front of your eyes. We could debate the evidence at length, but when even the Samsung lawyers couldn't tell the difference at a distance, that pretty much is the acid test.
Let's look at one of the most ridiculed claims - rounded corners. On the face of it, fair point, round corners are everywhere. But look at the 2 phones. Why that particular radius? Why that curvature on the bezel? Why that bezel width? Why that particular shape and size speaker at the top. There are no slots, details, mouldings or protrusions like there are with other Android phones. If you look here you can see that in 2007 they were picking up on the same themes as Apple, started by the iconic LG Chocolate and Prada Phones. You can also compare with the HTC phones of the time, no blatant ripping off there. From the F700 you can see there are clear design themes which emerged, but there is no sign of a rip off yet. Apple took up the themes that were around and refined them to the point of minimalist elegance that they do with everything else. Samsung saw how much better the iPhone was in design terms than their similar F700 device and simply ripped it off.
Let's turn to the interface. Almost all phones at the time had a grid layout with icons. Apple introduced the dock at the bottom - based on OS X. Apple introduced the interface with the tiled icons. Why did Samsung use that icon grid with icons that size? Why that many rows,and why the dock on the bottom? Notice that like Apple, their icons are also based on a tile format with rounded corners. Almost every other phone at the time had picture icons that weren't in a tile format. Look at the Samsung icon at the bottom right - that's a ripped off iTunes icon!
They have even blatantly copied the sliding screens and dots to indicate which screen you are on. Then if you look what happened when Apple introduced Siri, Samsung rip that off too, with their voice feature - and, look at that icon.
Then you can start to look at the Galaxy Ace. See an emerging theme? |
The stuff you pointed out wasn't unique to apple or samsung. Having icons in a grid? You could argue that was on palm pilots and the like. My wife's old BlackBerry she retired years ago had that. The dockbar, etc, have been with android for years, before Samsung started pushing it. The svoice thing? A redressing of things already in android. Voice recognition isn't new on phones. Blackberry, android, etc all had it before Siri.
As far as chargers? How are they anything alike? Because they use the usb cables as the cords? That is something largely the entire market did, partially out of pressure from the EU for uniform charging standards.