Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark
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.
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I think you might be missing the point
Of course icons in a grid was the standard UI that almost all phones had. However, why
that size,
that spacing,
that number, why rounded corners and why tiles?
If I asked you to design some phone icons on a grid, if you hadn't seen the iPhone UI, they would most likely look like all the other phone UIs that were around at the time. I'm a designer and I have been tweaking things like icons for over 15 years. I customised my Motorola Razr 2 Interface with new icons. I also customised my HTC Tytn2 interface after that. Yes they had grids, but the icons were smaller, the spacing between them was bigger, and they weren't in a tile format. Most phones at the time didn't have consistent tile format icons, but they did have a consistent appearance.
The thing is that when you immediately look at the two screens, you can see with absolute certainty that the one is a copy of the other. It's almost like the Samsung version was an early alpha of the iPhone UI.
The point about chargers is very important. Every other charger designed by everyone else is generic. It looks like the archetypal charger you get with Christmas lights to shavers. Same goes for laptop chargers. Apple's are unique. Designed to look nice, and much, much more compact. When Apple designed the iPhone charger in that completely novel cube form, there was nothing like it at the time. Samsung ripped it off utterly. Shape, size, rounding of the corners, even the positioning of the USB slot. It's so similar to Apple's and so different to everything else, that the only logical explanation is that they took the Apple device apart and copied it. Think about it, every other USB wall charger you have seen is a different size, shape and format, and designing the electronics to fit into a predefined box almost exactly like someone else's with the precise positioning of the charger slot in the same place makes no sense. Form follows function, things look the way they do based on the way their components fit inside. It's unquestionably a copy. Anyone denying this is blind or deluded. If you accept this, you have to accept the rest of the argument. Of all things, why copy the charger? It makes no sense. It's much more efficient to use one of the chargers you already make, because your factory is tooled up for it. Then look at the packaging design -
why?
Samsung is not a bad company. Compared with everyone else, it makes cool stuff that looks like product designers had some influence over the design and appearance, rather than the engineers deciding where everything fits, and asking the designers to make everything look nice afterwards. Apple uses a completely different design-led, integrated approach. The concept comes first and the hardware designers have to make the technology work to realise the design.
For Samsung to act like cheap rip-off merchants does no-one any good and they themselves ought to be ashamed.