So, that patent battle. All done and dusted, right? Just a few older Samsung handsets in the US affected, right? Well, not so. Despite rumours that the CEO’s of both Apple and Samsung are now “in talks”, the Apple legal team have named extra devices to their seperate complaint against the Galaxy Nexus.
The Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note 10.1 and Galaxy SIII are now all in the firing line, and Apple will no doubt be feeling supremely confident after their recent $1 billion win.
The patents appear to relate to “slide to unlock” again and that “universal search” feature. These have both been tweaked recently by Samsung but sadly there’s a raft of other complex patents included too.
Link – PDF
Via – Apple Insider
Enough already Apple, I use an iPhone but I’m really starting to dislike you
they really are the bully on the block now 🙁
They shouldn’t have copied then…… as always leigh you put your view across that apple are in the wrong….
Dont see blackberry or windows devices in the firing line …oh thats right because they did some innovation like apple and not try to copy other tech…
what do you want form apple is they want to use it pay for it the same as apple dose.
Samsung /Android are not small fry they are massive companies and know what they are doing….
I’d say that’s not “just” Leigh’s view – it’s shared by a great number of the public. Actually none of what Leigh said even remotely suggests that Apple are in the wrong; he was merely relaying news without stating any opinion as such.
Blackberry devices are falling dramatically out of favour with the consumer. Microsoft Windows Phone represents a tiny market share. One could argue that Apple are simply picking their battles, and if Microsoft were vying for more of Apple’s market-share, they’d be just as much in the firing-line.
Microsoft haven’t innovated much really. They’ve copied elements from the iPhone just as much as anybody else has; it’s just that most of those are not patentable!
Apple are just in a strong position because of the way they protect themselves – not necessarily because of the way they innovate. I think each manufacturers argument against each of these innovations is as weak as the next.
Apple’s design is undoubtedly a good one, but their innovation is so intrinsic to the way people interface with devices that it has become almost ubiquitous.
I liken it to the way your car’s basic controls are set out. The layout we are all familiar with was not standardised. Hard to imagine. In 1916, Cadillac was the first to release a car with the ‘modern’ layout. This was popularised by Austin in 1922 in the Austin 7. No patents were registered, but the design just ‘worked’ and it caught on, leading to the layout in cars some 1.5 billion of us use today.
This is very similar to the iPhone story. Apple’s design just worked, and in a way never really experienced before. It is hard to imagine what the average Smartphone interface was like before this, and it’s changed our expectations, subconsciously, of how every other device should work.
Well done Apple, you’ve made your buck. You’re the most powerful company in the world. What now? Maybe you should forget about pursuing petty lawsuits, and maybe do something decent for the world.
doesn’t mean Samsung can rip them off others aren’t doing so..
why don’t they come up with something new and make everyone else change ….
they have more phones out there than apple but only there high end ones are copying apple what does that says about Samsung..
this site plays on apple being the bad party but the large companys doing it that need to be sorted out..
if we want innovation they need to start doing some work ….
Just to pick up on a few points. There are considerably more patent disputes in the automotive industry than there are in the phone industry. This has been the case since the first car. Henry Ford was quite a prolific patenter in fact.
Also, the reason Microsoft aren’t in the firing line is because they’ve got a cross licensing deal with Apple. The 2 companies don’t sue each other anymore.
It is important to bear in mind that whilst Samsung may not always “cast the first stone” in these cases they do retaliate in kind. They have the option to license beforehand and they have the option to settle out of court also. They choose to fight Apple and so if they lose, they only have themselves to blame really.
Well, I realise a great deal has gone on in the automotive industry legally but that wasn’t really the point I was trying to get across. What I was trying to say was that one company came up with a standard, and because it made so much sense, it was universally adopted. This is what I personally believe Apple have done, and it is very easy to overlook how crap smartphones were before Apple, then subsequently Google did their bit.
I don’t believe that Samsung are ripping Apple off particularly. I think they are also innovating plenty. At the end of the day, Apple is making more profit than any company reasonably should, and Samsung aren’t doing bad either.
It is my personally held belief that the power Apple has should be used more responsibly than it is, and that when a single company has the success Apple has seen over the past ten years, how it operates is in the interest of the entire world. The worlds legal systems do not and cannot account for this.
They all appear to be as bad as each other. Apple obviously consider Sammy to be a major threat, and for me this casts doubts over their next flagship.
In terms of the innovation ios, Android and WPx all seem to be borrowing each others ideas. It’s got the point where each has to have an equivalent feature to keep themselves in the game.
Once they have matched a particular feature they then raise the bar for the other competitors to match and then exceed.
Examples that spring to mind.
– pull down notifications
– siri – voice actions
– High res screens
– Airplay – DLNA
– OTA updates
– Free Navigation
– icon based apps -widgets – tiles
How on earth can you patent a slide to unlock feature? isn’t this what in the electrical world would be called a “switch” surely it just replicates that basic electronic functionality but on a touch screen?!?!? I understand companies wanting to protect their intellectual property rights, but it sounds to me like a lot of these patents are poorly awarded, but this is all just getting silly. I appreciate Apple make popular products and have innovated with their designs, but was it not Steve Jobs who said he would destroy Android / Google if it cost apple everything it had? Yeah, because that’s not Anti-competitive in any way! Time for everyone to stop throwing their monopoly pieces off the board methinks!
{{{The patents appear to relate to “slide to unlock” again and that “universal search” feature.}}}
Really??? Aren’t their about a million apps that do that anyway?