Samsung v. Apple

[holymadness]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

There are other methods. The card doesn't have to be one the logic board itself. As long as there is room for contacts. Plus the same excuse doesn't apply for iPad, which has way more room.

If you agree that adding a SD card would entail compromises on either functionality or design, then the debate is over. As for the iPad, this isn't the best picture, but I don't see all this room you've mentioned.

And why couldn't something be done ala the fusion drive? That's Apple's new drive made by combining a traditional hard drive and a SSD. Frequently used stuff gets stored on the NAND, less often used stuff gets stored on the platters. For iOS, have frequently used stuff on internal NAND, and use the SD for long term storage.

The fusion drive never leaves the computer, so it's not comparable to a SD card.

And no reason those other companies can't be hated. Fanboyish hate doesn't preclude hatred of companies outside of the sphere of the fanboy's interest.

No it doesn't, but the obsession speaks to a lack of perspective and a sense of proportion.

[Hellmark]

With many tablets and phones, they never leave either. People install them and forget about them. Hell, many are a pain to remove. My old phone had the micro SD slot under the battery. I would have to take the case off, the back cover and the battery to get to it and the SIM card.

And that iPad pic, you're looking at the shielding under the display, that doesn't give an accurate idea of space.

And some people get obsessed only when the topic comes up. If they only ever talked about it, then you could say they lacked perspective.

[holymadness]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

With many tablets and phones, they never leave either. People install them and forget about them. Hell, many are a pain to remove. My old phone had the micro SD slot under the battery. I would have to take the case off, the back cover and the battery to get to it and the SIM card.

Basically, what you're proposing is that Apple just charge less for on-board storage, since if you never swap out your SD card there's no real advantage to using one vs. using integrated memory.

And that iPad pic, you're looking at the shielding under the display, that doesn't give an accurate idea of space.

I couldn't find a very good pic of the iPad internals. If you have one, please share. I would be surprised if there was any empty space; the iPad 3 actually became thicker and heavier than the iPad 1 & 2 in order to hold a bigger battery.

And some people get obsessed only when the topic comes up. If they only ever talked about it, then you could say they lacked perspective.

Fair enough. I'm not going to launch an inquisition and go through people's posting history dating back months to identify all their interests. Anecdotally, it seems to me that the people who are obsessed with the smartphone wars rarely post in topics relating to anything else.

[kennyc]

Well, I'll just say, ask yourself, what fruit was it in the garden that did the deed?

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

Actually, I think that it is just the radio frequencies that are different. 4G is Long Term Evolution (LTE) most everywhere. I think that T-Mobile in the USA calls HSDPA+ to be 4G, but that terminology is debatable. From what I have seen the iPhone 5 here also uses the nano SIM. Of course, if you have a SIM cutter tool every SIM can be a nano SIM.

This might explain the terminology (or just confuse you more).

But I ran across this:

Apple will produce three models of the iPhone: one optimized for U.S. carrier AT&T's network and spectrum bands, another for Sprint and Verizon's U.S. norms and a third for the rest of the world, including two European operators.

Only Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Everything Everywhere in the UK will initially be able to offer the fastest internet access to iPhone 5 users in their markets, because they are the carriers holding the right frequencies.

So while the two European operators do have the right frequency, the phones sold in Europe will be different in some regard from the ones sold in the US. Apple won't be making phones that use other frequencies, so I'm unclear about the need for different models.

Originally Posted by holymadness

You call Apple users brainwashed sheep, you spend all your time in Apple threads dumping on their products and the people who buy them, you spam mocking videos and pictures and high-five each other over your little jokes. Every second post is a "LOL yeah!" or "So true!" In other words, you seek it out, then complain about it. Forgive me for rolling my eyes.

I don't disagree about the way PatNY comes off in regards to Apple, but I was confused by the fact that he has an iPod (according to his device list).

[PatNY]

Originally Posted by holymadness

I seem to have some difficulty understanding a subtlety of the mobileread forum code of conduct. It seems it's frowned upon to say "X is an idiot for believing Y" but perfectly acceptable to say "People who believe Y are idiots," even if those people happen to be posting in that same thread. Why this should be is unclear, but it would be nice if those who did it didn't feign shock and outrage when the level of discourse, which they began by trampling into the mud, isn't civil enough.

You sure do have trouble understanding the rules here so let me repeat what a moderator said just a few posts back: "Our posting guidelines clearly state that personally insulting your fellow members is not tolerated." What about "personally insulting" don't you understand???

There is nothing subtle about this code of conduct either. It's pretty much standard on most civil forums throughout the web. It would be a pretty sad day when a person on a forum couldn't criticize a group of people. Your inability to understand this distinction between the general and personal is your problem. And no one is going to change just to accommodate your thin skin.

You call Apple users brainwashed sheep, you spend all your time in Apple threads dumping on their products and the people who buy them, you spam mocking videos and pictures and high-five each other over your little jokes. Every second post is a "LOL yeah!" or "So true!" In other words, you seek it out, then complain about it. Forgive me for rolling my eyes.

Sigh, I'm gonna say this, even though it may be personally insulting, but you seem confused, lost or just have problems reading. This thread is titled "Samsung vs. Apple" so it is not just an Apple thread. It's equally a Samsung/Android thread -- and if you really think about it, the issues discussed in this thread impact the entire tablet market since they center around industry wide litigation. Moreover, this is NOT the Apple forum. It's a general news forum. If you don't like the jabs being thrown at your "sheeple" and your religion, stay out of here. No one is forcing you to read what any of us are saying.

If you can't hold your temper and you keep personally insulting other posters here, so be it. But people are going to keep calling you out on it. And it just shows you up for the kind of person you really are.

What is there to say else but that you are wrong?

Size and shape go hand in hand, so if you admit one you necessarily admit the other. As things stand in the iPhone, there is simply no room to add a SD card reader. If you were to add one into the current form factor, you would have to remove other elements or crowd the interior. It is one or the other and both entail sacrifices.

No, you are wrong. Or again, maybe it's your failure once again to read properly or to process what the words mean. I originally said: "Size, yes. But I don't know that the shape of a device would have to change much by adding a card slot (so long as it was included at the inception of the design).

So, if you include the card slot at the beginning of the design process, you can make other components into a different shape to accommodate the added card slot. So, NO, you would not necessarily have to change the shape of the design. An iPhone can still have the same iPhone shape. It might just be a tiny bit heavier or a tiny big larger (footprint) with the card slot. But it can retain the same shape as it had before. It may not even have to have a larger footprint. Making the phone a little thicker could be the way to go to accommodate the added piece of hardware.

Please don't feign naīveté about the complexity external storage would add to iOS. Currently, iOS users never need to worry about managing their media. To add external storage would require making choices about where to store one's music and one's apps, what would happen if the card was swapped out, where files go if one drive becomes full and the other has space on it. These are not world-ending changes, but they are contrary to Apple's approach to iOS.

Incorrect. You definitely have to worry even now about how media shows up on iOS -- ie, Are you running out of space? Is iTunes correctly syncing over all your songs and books? Is the media showing up properly in the music app (it doesn't always). Most Apple users can handle such stuff, and adding an SD card slot while limiting its contents to media would not be adding any complexity that someone with half a brain couldn't deal with. It's you who are painting Apple users to be a bunch of idiots. If you polled current Apple users on whether they would like a micro SD card slot, I bet you it would be a landslide in favor of it -- if not 100% unanimous.

It is pretty funny to see someone choose, of all the companies in the world to hate, Apple. Instead of say, Monsanto, Bank of America, or BP. Well, nevermind. To each his own, though your priorities say a lot about you.

You really do like to exaggerate, don't you? I have a lot of criticisms of Apple, but I don't "hate" them. It seems that anyone who utters a bad word about your fruity religion ... you can only see hatred and black hats. It says a lot about your personality that you always react this way.

In any case, Apple is no more litigous than any other tech company. They just receive more press for it. You'll have to find a better reason than that.

Look at the dates, and with few exceptions (such as Kodak) it appears Apple started most of the litigation. The others are slugging back. Moreover, Apple's suits appear to be especially frivolous, based on vague and specious design claims, rather than some real innovative technology.

And finally, bias is bias. It's not clear why we should take anything you say seriously when you admit you can't be objective.

Ahhh, is it your reading issues once more, or just your tendency to exaggerate popping up again? Nowhere did I say I couldn't be objective. OTOH, it's clear you can't be. Your response to the littlest slight against your religion is to see red and get all emotional, seriously clouding your judgment.

Heh, amusing.


Shrug, I'm not going to go through 30 pages to satisfy your pendantry for block quotes. It has been said and often over the last few weeks that I've posted regularly here. Do a search.

Indeed, quite amusing. You're the one making the specious claim. So it's up to you to prove it. You do the search. But of course you won't. Because you know what you said wasn't true. You just said it for hyperbole and to inflame -- lol, the very thing you are accusing the other side of doing!

--Pat

[jjallenupthehill]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

It may take one person ten minutes to lay out an icon matrix on a screen, and 100s of thousands of man hours to design the functionality of a cell phone radio and baseband, for example.

Well - really, no. Seriously. You won't believe the time it can take a designer to get a simple thing right, like the radius/curvature of an icon or the spacing on a screen, or even the background colour. I once had a client who had the office change the size of a full stop (period for US readers) 4 times in his logo by just 50mm on a 1:50 drawing. The difference was infinitesimal! Thats an extreme and ridiculous example, but it's not as uncommon as you would think. That's why I have been banging on about curve radii and some really subtle design things that most people just won't get. Make no mistake, the iPhone took thousands and thousands of hours and prototypes to get 'just right'. That's precisely why it's so irritating to have someone else totally rip it off.

Originally Posted by Dave_S

Even if the icon matrix took longer than a few minutes, there is no indication that more than a few minutes is required, or that extensive education is required. There certainly is no chance at all of throwing together a smartphone radio and baseband in a few minutes, and the education in multiple disciplines of the people involved is very extensive. Even the work involved in ripping off significant functionality is far greater than the work involved on the design elements in question.

Sadly, you're just wrong here. I know it sounds completely counter-intuitive, and very possibly quite mad, but sometimes 'simple' design is quite the opposite. To achieve something that looks simple is often much more complex than something which looks, well - complex.

The reason for this is that with so few elements to play with, every one has to be tweaked so that it is just right. When Sony designed the original Walkman, it took them weeks and weeks just to get the feel of the button just right. We're not even talking about what something looks like here. The idea was to create something that had a really satisfying feel to it that made people just want to play with it, in a compelling bubble wrap kind of way.

Originally Posted by Dave_S

The time and effort required are not even within several orders of magnitude of each other, so there is certainly a huge difference in value. I think part of the whole point of this Samsung vs. Apple thing is that the design elements in question are so trivial that it is withing the realm of possibility that something that appears to be a copy is just purely accidental. Others have already pointed out that close examination reveals differences in design elements that were allegedly copied.

Please believe me when I say that I really don't mean to be rude, but this does betray a level of 'visual ignorance'. The same way that a carpenter can tell a good piece of wood by how it feels, or an arboriculturalist can tell an unhealthy tree by tiny spots on the leaves, a racing driver can tell whether his suspension is slightly soft and losing him a fraction of a second under braking or a bricklayer can tell a good job by a couple of mm in the width of the joints, in a weird, mad way, these things are important. Most people don't appreciate the time and effort that goes into something as simple as the right curvature on a corner or the width of a border. Apple do, because they are obsessive. I suspect Samsung do, because they are not otherwise a bad company, and they do understand design. They aren't as good at it as Apple, or HTC, but they do understand it.

Most people just have a sense when something looks right. They don't necessarily know why, but sometimes something looks so right that it looks effortless. So people think, "What's the big deal? Some curves here and there, an icon grid, it's obvious". it's actually not. It's kind of design nirvana to design something so well that there looks like no other solution.

This is the kind of thing that Samsung have ripped off without putting the effort in. Just like the school jerk who plays around in class and copies exam answers from the quiet nerd who has been working hard - it's stealing, and it's plain wrong.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not an archetypal Apple fanboi who thinks they can do no wrong. Apple Maps is a big problem, and Siri is frankly next to useless.
In terms of hardware design though, Jony Ive is a truly great designer. Because he makes stuff that is relatively cheap (in comparison to cars, boats and buildings) many people don't seem to appreciate quite how good he is.

Think about it, if the iPhone were a song, and the Galaxy S3 was just as similar, would this thread have gone on quite so long?

[jersysman]

I don't think this thread's life will last much longer.

[jjallenupthehill]

Originally Posted by kennyc

You miss the point. I didn't say anything about protection in general. The Patent System was put in place for a specific purpose and it's not protecting design or software.

Fair point, well made, and accepted.

Design should protected by copyright.

[PatNY]

Originally Posted by jjallenupthehill

I know how inspiration works, but you never, ever take something and copy it so that it looks almost exactly the same. If I did that with a building, I would be sued - no question.

Rose Center for Earth and Space, opened 2000:

Apple's Upper West Side store, opened 2009:

And Apple had the nerve to patent the UWS store design.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe never patented their architecture. But somehow, Apple feels the need to patent a design that's highly derivative of I.M Pei's Louvre entrance and the Rose Center!

--Pat

[jjallenupthehill]

Originally Posted by jersysman

I don't think this thread's life will last much longer.

Noooo, first of all we need to get to the stage where most people just accept that in the recent court case, Samsung clearly did rip Apple off. Despite all their arguing and posturing by expensive lawyers, anyone with a pair of eyes, an open mind and a clear sense of right and wrong, and an IQ significantly greater than their shoe size ought to conclude that in that particular instance, it was pretty much a straightforward rip-off.

It doesn't make Samsung evil, it certainly doesn't mean that they are nothing more than a talentless far Eastern rip-off merchant, but it does dent their reputation very badly and they have too much at stake to just acquiesce quietly.

Then I need to move on to the anti Apple bias. I'm not the sort of guy that thinks the sun shines out of their corporate backside, but some of the invective labelled against them is hypocritical, disingenuous, misleading and plain ignorant.

I think we have a little while yet..

[jjallenupthehill]

Originally Posted by PatNY

Rose Center for Earth and Space, opened 2000:

Apple's Upper West Side store, opened 2009:

And Apple had the nerve to patent the UWS store design.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe never patented their architecture. But somehow, Apple feels the need to patent a design that's highly derivative of I.M Pei's Louvre entrance and the Rose Center!

--Pat

You're not very observant about architecture, and I'm not sure you have been reading the thread carefully enough. Your point is....?

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by jjallenupthehill

Noooo, first of all we need to get to the stage where most people just accept that in the recent court case, Samsung clearly did rip Apple off. Despite all their arguing and posturing by expensive lawyers, anyone with a pair of eyes, an open mind and a clear sense of right and wrong, and an IQ significantly greater than their shoe size ought to conclude that in that particular instance, it was pretty much a straightforward rip-off.

Yes. Damn Samsung and their expensive lawyers. If only Apple could afford decent lawyers. I'm almost weeping over the inequity of it all.

Perhaps we should have a whip round?

[holymadness]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

Yes. Damn Samsung and their expensive lawyers. If only Apple could afford decent lawyers. I'm almost weeping over the inequity of it all.

Perhaps we should have a whip round?

It's really simple. If you spent a lot of time and money to create something original, you would be furious if someone turned around and ripped off your inventions. It is obvious that people who defend Samsung's copying are not creators and have never experienced plagiarism or other kinds of IP theft. It is no different from Sears Craftsman ripping off the Bionic Wrench.

[PatNY]

Originally Posted by jjallenupthehill

You're not very observant about architecture, and I'm not sure you have been reading the thread carefully enough. Your point is....?

While the two buildings don't look "exactly" the same, the Apple clone is extremely derivative of prior designs, ripping-off the most prominent features of two well-known architectural masterpieces. Which wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't had the gall to patent the design. It's laughable.

If you can't see it, you're not very observant about architecture, nor are you very objective.

--Pat