Did the Apple vs Samsung trial made you feel differently about Apple?

[boss.king]

Way to just make up an argument based on your stereotype. As usual, you simply change the argument of the other person to make it easy for you to contradict. I have no doubt that the core Android OS was made to be adaptable to a variety of form factors. I'm not one of those posters that posted the "Android before iPhone..." pictures, nor do I think that they prove anything.

I simply asked for evidence that Android was developing a multitouch UI before the iPhone was announced. If you have posted it before as you claim, a simple link would be nice instead of posting once again how proud you are of your ignore list.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_

They were trying to design a versatile OS, the Blackberryesque design was used because at the time it was a popular hardware design.

 

[tigres]

For the most part, I see it as apple protecting their IP. We all know what the iPhone brought to the table, and what was available in the market before/during and after the 2007 launch.

How about Samsung's S-Launcher for windows 8.
No similarities, right



"And of course, the S Launcher is also a launcher. Simply drag apps or files to it for easy access, tossing them off when you don't want them anymore. Nothing groundbreaking in that, but it doesn't hurt, either, and the icons are bigger than in the Windows taskbar.
The settings icon is helpful, too. Windows 8 moves your computer settings to different places, and Samsung's custom settings saves you the trouble of finding out where. It gathers many everyday controls -- including user accounts, power management, display settings and sound -- into one spot on the desktop."




Source: Yahoo

 

[BaldiMac]

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_

They were trying to design a versatile OS, the Blackberryesque design was used because at the time it was a popular hardware design.

That doesn't prove your claim. Again, Android's versatility is not in question. What I questioned was your claim that Android was developing a multitouch UI prior to the iPhone's announcement.

 

[boss.king]

That doesn't prove your claim. Again, Android's versatility is not in question. What I questioned was your claim that Android was developing a multitouch UI prior to the iPhone's announcement.

That wasn't my claim. My claim was that Android was intended for touch phones, my article supports it.

 

[BaldiMac]

That wasn't my claim. My claim was that Android was intended for touch phones, my article supports it.

How do you figure? The only evidence in the article that I could find was a prototype released almost a year after the iPhone was announced.

 

[wikus]

Ah the lament of those who never invented anything, but made a living by copying.

Much like Apple?

 

[kdarling]

They were trying to design a versatile OS, the Blackberryesque design was used because at the time it was a popular hardware design.

People keep saying it looked like a "Blackberry", yet Android was clearly designed to be more like Windows Mobile (touch, non, keyboard, whatever).

The "Sooner" development device was actually a version of an HTC WinMo non-touch phone, very similar to a Moto Q or Samsung Blackjack. HTC was also working on the "Dream" touchscreen model with slideout keyboard, but it wasn't ready yet.



Dianne Hackborn (picture here), a respected developer who joined Android in 2006, gave this bit of history in response to a headline claiming the Sooner was killed by the iPhone:

Dianne:

I think this gives a somewhat misleading impressions of what happened.

From a software perspective, Sooner and Dream were basically the same -- different form-factors, one without a touch screen -- but they were not so different as this article indicates and the switch between them was not such a huge upheaval.

The main reason for the differences in schedule was hardware: Sooner was a variation of an existing device that HTC was shipping, while Dream was a completely new device with a lot of things that had never been shipped before, at least by HTC (new Qualcomm chipset, sensors, touch screen, the hinge design, etc). So Sooner was the safe/fast device, and Dream was the risky/long-term device.

However the other factor in this was the software. Work on the Android we know today (which is what is running in that Sooner) basically started around late 2005 / early 2006. I got to Google at the beginning of 2006, and it was around that time we started work on everything from the resource system through the view hierarchy, to the window manager and activity manager that you know today. Some work on stuff we have today (like SurfaceFlinger) was started a bit earlier, but also after Google acquired Android.

Even if there was no iPhone, there is a good chance that Sooner would have been dropped, since while it was a good idea to get Android out quickly from a hardware perspective, the software schedule was much longer. I don't recall the exact dates, but I believe the decision to drop Sooner was well before the iPhone announcement... though we continued to use it for quite a while internally for development, since it was the only semi-stable hardware platform we had. If nothing else, it helped remove significant risk from the schedule since software development could be done on a relatively stable device while the systems team brought up the new hardware in parallel.

So what you see running on that Sooner is the same Android that would run on Dream. This is one of the reasons we have the -notouch resource qualifier, for the UI select a touch-based or non-touch interface depending on the device. Also at that point most of the widgets you see in the UI (lists and such) are the ListView and GalleryView we have today, and would already be able to react to touch input if they received it. And the software on there was using our layout managers to resize the UI elements to match the screen size.

However that build may not have things in it like actually running apps in multiple processes. That was one of the lagging implementations in Android, which was increasingly making the hardware schedule for Sooner not match the software schedule for Android. I think almost everyone on the team was relieved when Sooner was dropped, just because it gave some relieve on the core software schedule.

Imagine if Sooner had gone out at a reasonable time before Dream, say a year before. This was when we released the preview SDK. We had a mad dash to get the SDK somewhat cleaned up for that, but did lots of iterations on it in the following months. We had barely gotten multiple processes working (it was so close you still see remnants of our single process environment in the SDK with Application.onTerminate).

During the time from when the SDK came out to when the G1 shipped, we spent many many months working on stabilizing, optimizing, and productizing the platform. This was a platform that had never been shipped before, with a lot of pretty unusual designs -- up until near the end, you had to wonder "is this actually going to work?"

We also had a long lead time required in stabilizing the platform before shipping the device. Partly because of uncertainty of how everything would work together, partly because the team hadn't shipped a device before and didn't know the tricks we do now for tuning the release schedule. At the time we shipped the device, we even felt like we had to assume that what we shipped on the ROM was it, and we would never be able to deliver an update to it!

So be careful when you look at screen shots. People who aren't programmers, understandably, see a UI and take that to be all there is to know. We should know however that what is behind the part you can see is actually a lot more complicated, stuff you could never realize just from what you see with your eyes. People throwing up pictures of a UI they have played with and coming to conclusion that explain what is going on behind the scenes may get some things wrong.

And then she continued, in response to a question about the emulator:

The early emulator was released with the goal to get feedback on APIs and developers starting on basic application development. A lot of the real UI stuff was not visible in order to avoid it being leaked in an incomplete state.

If you look at the schedule, it would be pretty hard to believe that in the less than a year from the first emulator release until devices are being sold, the entire platform was stabilized *and* the entire UI was changed from being DPAD-based to touch-based. The same people stabilizing the different parts of the platform would also often need to be doing any work on touch -- for example the view hierarchy was a big new piece of code that had never been shipped, and would have significant disruptive work to add touch support later on. Even if you had a large number of engineers working on it (which there were not) you couldn't stabilize it at the same time you were making such changes.

 

[KnightWRX]

That wasn't my claim. My claim was that Android was intended for touch phones, my article supports it.

Don't say I didn't warn you

 

[boss.king]

How do you figure? The only evidence in the article that I could find was a prototype released almost a year after the iPhone was announced.

So are you implying they developed the entirety of Androids touch implementation in a few months? All the iPhone did was cement touch as the focus of the platform. which hardly constitutes copying, it's simply listening to the consumer.

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Don't say I didn't warn you

I'll listen next time, I promise

 

[BaldiMac]

So are you implying they developed the entirety of Androids touch implementation in a few months? All the iPhone did was cement touch as the focus of the platform. which hardly constitutes copying, it's simply listening to the consumer.

Not at all. The didn't release it for almost two years from the iPhone announcement. I think 9-10 months to a limited prototype isn't hard to imagine.

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People keep saying it looked like a "Blackberry", yet Android was clearly designed to be more like Windows Mobile (touch, non, keyboard, whatever).

People may have said that in the past, but that wasn't what we were discussing. The whole Blackberry argument was brought up by KnightWRX as FUD.

Don't say I didn't warn you

Of course, you'll hide behind your ignore list and ignore the fact that you mischaracterized my argument.

 

[laurim]

As a shareholder, I expect Apple to fully protect anything that gives them a competitive edge in this very competitive environment. That is their duty to us. The minute you don't protect your IP is the moment you lose future rights to defend it.

 

[boss.king]

People keep saying it looked like a "Blackberry", yet Android was clearly designed to be more like Windows Mobile (touch, non, keyboard, whatever).

The "Sooner" development device was actually a version of an HTC WinMo non-touch phone, very similar to a Moto Q or Samsung Blackjack. HTC was also working on the "Dream" touchscreen model with slideout keyboard, but it wasn't ready yet.

View attachment 354911

Dianne Hackborn (picture here), a respected developer who joined Android in 2006, gave this bit of history in response to a headline claiming the Sooner was killed by the iPhone:



And then she continued, in response to a question about the emulator:

Interesting read, I've never seen this before.

 

[KnightWRX]

The minute you don't protect your IP is the moment you lose future rights to defend it.

Again, that is a false statement. There is no time limit to enforce patents or copyrights. The only IP protection mecanism that requires you to actively defend it are Trademarks.

 

[ChristianVirtual]

Apple should take the 1bn $, book it as license income and don't seek sales ban. That gets too much greedy. They won, it's accepted but now move on and don't kill competition in curt room. Blow them away in sales room.

 

[chrono1081]

I can see there are a lot of mixed feelings about this, so I was wondering how people here feel about the whole matter. Where you discouraged/disappointed with Apple because of this? Did it change how you previously viewed Apple?

I'm glad Apple protected their IP. Samsung will now be forced to innovate (just like Microsoft did with their phones) vs imitate.

 

[richarddwyer10]

 

[KnightWRX]

I'm glad Apple protected their IP. Samsung will now be forced to innovate (just like Microsoft did with their phones) vs imitate.

What's so innovative about Windows Phone exactly ? Full screen, multi-touch, icon grids (sorry, they're called tiles and don't have rounded edges, they're just squares on screen).

Seems to me it's pretty much the same ol', same ol'. That is, if you believe there is nothing else to these phone OSes than just the overlaying UI.

 

[kdarling]

I'm glad Apple protected their IP. Samsung will now be forced to innovate (just like Microsoft did with their phones) vs imitate.

The trial was mostly about old devices. Samsung's already gone on to doing their own stuff a while back.

Now we're far more likely to see Apple doing things that Samsung has done: active pen input, multi-windows, etc.

It doesn't really matter who starts doing something first. After a while, features are taken for granted. Plus, ten years from now, today's phones will seem quaint.

 

[gnasher729]

As for Apple, they already borrow HEAVILY from Braun, so it's not like they're innocent in all of this to start with.

Show me anything made by Braun that looks anything like an iPhone.

Jonathan Ive uses the same design principles that Dieter Rams used, and created designs that look totally different from Braun designs (unless you carefully pose the different designs to make them appear similar to the naive viewer). Samsung could have used the same design principles as Apple, and if they had equally good designers, they would have ended up with a beautiful looking phone - that looks nothing like an iPhone.

And besides, the iPhone looks too much like the LG Prada phone, which came out before the iPhone.

What in these two photos looks similar, except for the two hands, which are not similar, but identical? So you are really trying to play some cheap trick here, that's all.

 

[ChristianVirtual]

View attachment 354913

Poor Nokia, but soo true ... That often happen to market leader feeling to secure ... Being the second in a market keeps you running

 

[boss.king]

Show me anything made by Braun that looks anything like an iPhone.

Jonathan Ive uses the same design principles that Dieter Rams used, and created designs that look totally different from Braun designs (unless you carefully pose the different designs to make them appear similar to the naive viewer). Samsung could have used the same design principles as Apple, and if they had equally good designers, they would have ended up with a beautiful looking phone - that looks nothing like an iPhone.

Carefully posing? Isn't that what Apple has done with the evidence in the trial? (hint: it is)

 

[gnasher729]

Carefully posing? Isn't that what Apple has done with the evidence in the trial? (hint: it is)

You left out half of what I said. I said "designs that look totally different from Braun designs (unless you carefully pose the different designs to make them appear similar to the naive viewer)". In case of Samsung phones, you have identical designs, and of course Apple wouldn't confuse the matter by showing them from different views than the iPhone.

 

[Renzatic]

From what I've read, the foreman was in the wrong due to how he approached the evidence. He didn't look at the examples and think "do these previous inventions invalidate Apple's patents". Rather, he thought "if I were Apple, could I defend my patents against the prior art". He didn't view the case from a neutral perspective. He took Apple's side immediately, and used his experience as a patent holder to argue for infringement on Samsung's part.

That's not how you responsibly weigh evidence.

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What's so innovative about Windows Phone exactly ? Full screen, multi-touch, icon grids (sorry, they're called tiles and don't have rounded edges, they're just squares on screen).

Apple's innovation: The colorful icon:

MS' apparently entirely different take on the matter. The Tile:

...I think some people are mixing up invention and style here.

Also, Metro icons are really easy to make.

 

[ixodes]

Apple's massive success has nothing to do with the validity of patent law. IP theft is theft and deserves the harshest of punishments. I think Samsung should be fined $100 billion.

I doubt you read the post. It doesn't say the two are related. You did. Nor did it defend Samsung, or suggest they not be made to pay.

Therefore your position is irrelevant.

 

[KnightWRX]

I doubt you read the post. It doesn't say the two are related. You did. Nor did it defend Samsung, or suggest they not be made to pay.

Therefore your position is irrelevant.

Not to mention wrong. There was no patent theft. How do you even steal a patent ? Break into the USPTO's systems and change the ownership of the patent to yourself ? Sounds like a lot of trouble for something that will be quickly restore from a known good backup.

It's not like back in the days when there were definite patent certificates. Then you could physically steal the patent certificate and claim it was yours all along... after making sure to erase the owner's name and writing your own on there. Or something.

Some people have problem with the proper word : Infringement. I don't know why people insist on using things like copying and theft when the legal term is infringement.