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?
Apple didn't sue all the other phone manufacturers who were influenced by the iPhone, just the biggest one who totally and utterly blatantly copied it.
The worst thing about this is that Samsung are better than this. They make all sorts of elegant devices at a good price point. Their design simply isn't as good as Apple's, as their own documents acknowledge, but it's a good company making good stuff. If it had been an unknown Chinese company that had done this, everyone would simply dismiss it as another example of product plagiarism from a country which doesn't protect copyright.
Except it came from Korea, from one of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world. It's shameful. If I were Tim Cook, I simply wouldn't comply with the UK judge's recent ruling, I would just pay the fine without blinking. The UK judgement was absurd in every respect.
As for the clear anti Apple sentiment that has been expressed here and elsewhere, this is not only more ignorance and disingenuousness, but also bigotry and hypocrisy. People will happily buy L'Oreal shampoo and drive Audis instead of supermarket own brands and Skodas, but they rail vociferously at people for buying Apple products...