A small point, about the 'prior art', by no
means I wanted to say,
that it doesn't matter... in fact, I
was trying to avoid it integrally (it is
quite a murky
territory... let's see the play in the court room), as much
as
the 'lawful/fair' (the first one is a matter of law, and
what the judge
accepts... the last one is a point of view).
I think you really
need to take your blinkers off and do
a good Google Images search for
smartphones since, say,
2004. Start with the iPAQ h6300. Come back and tell me
that
anyone in the market made a huge sytle inovation that makes
the following
trade dress a substantial deviation from what
everyone else was using:
- A rectangular product with four evenly rounded
corners;
- A flat,
clear surface covering the front of the
product;
- A display screen
under the clear surface;
- Under the clear surface, substantial neutral
(black or
white) borders above and below the display screen and
narrower
neutral borders on either side of the screen;
- When the device is on, a
matrix of colorful square
icons with evenly rounded corners within the display
screen;
and
- When the device is on, a bottom dock of colorful
square
icons with evenly rounded corners set off from the
other icons in the display,
which does not change as other
pages of the user interface are
viewed.
Anyway, although many can (would) argue
that
'design' (specially in software) is an 'ad hoc' thing, in
fact there is a
lot of 'psychological research' on it.
Design (especially
software) is never ad-hoc.
And regarding the cars comparison
(and I don't
know how many have noticed the c180 versus, for instance,
125i...thing :)
What is your point - They look completely
different
(apart from the fact that they are both
cars)
although, as you have said, year-after-year,
they look
alike, for one thing, if you just look at the
front of a car, even without any
label, even if it is a new
model, chances are you will recognize the brand
(otherwise
the design team would have failed
miserably..).
Again, what is your point? As I said, my Samsung
Galaxy
SII has the Samsung logo on the front, just like a BMW or
Mercedes.
And this is my point, see, I'm a over 50+
electronic engineering, work with operating systems back the
end of 70s. Have
worked with minix, sunos, hpux,
aix....and the last 10+ years with linux as well
(and M$). I
know from the distance if an smart-phone is an
apple/samsung/lg/nokia. But I have colleagues
(at my Univ. Department) that
can't tell them apart,
seriously, one was so off as thinking that 'a samsung
phone'
was an 'apple's second line phone'
And I am sure other
people confused the Nokia Lumina with
the iPhone, or the LG Optimus, Sony
Experia, Toshiba TG01,
etc, etc. Point is, all smartphones today conform to a
standard appearance. Did Apple create this
appearance, or did it evolve
naturally over time?
... so, let's not argue of how much
'clueless'
someone can be.... and that's one of the reasons of this
'hole
theater', I mean, this is not about the ones who know
better, this is about the
ones that don't have a clue (and
they are the majority).
Are
they really? Or is Apple trying to drum this up?
As you said,
many go for an 'android phone',
well how many of them know what this
entices?
My wife (who is totally not tech-savy) was swayed to
Android because we could sync our Google calanders with each
other. You seem
to be making an assumption that most
consumers are blank-eyed drones that only
buy for cool-
factor.
It has happened before (net-books... many
buyed
a linux netbook because it was 'cheaper', just to find out
it wasn't
windows... sure, they should know better... but
the fact is, they simply don't
know).
And this isn't a 'niche market', this is about 100+millions
of
devices year, most of the buyers are price sensitive, and
if a brand get erode
to the point of no value, what is the
point of a
brand?
Before buying a 3Gs, I had a samsung (if I
recall it was HD something...), well, extremely nice phone,
but no firmware
upgrade, the synchronization (with a PC)
was a mess.
The 3Gs was a bliss,
and best of all, when I bought a 4s, I
just connect it and, after a while a got
the 'same phone' in
a new body...
Maybe you should have just
bought a new iPhone 3GS
this is quite remarkable when you look
the
alternatives.
No, it is not remarkable at all. One of the
reasons I
love my Android phone is that I can sync my Google contacts,
calander, etc. So I can buy any other Android phone, and
immediately re-sync.
Oh, and once I buy an app, I can re-
download it to any device. With iTunes
(last I checked) once
you download it, that's it - if you loose it, you have to
buy it again. so with iTunes, you need to make sure you make
a backup every
time you download an app. Now maybe iCloud
does this automatically, but what if
I don't want to sign up
to iCloud and have Apple in control of all my
data?
Am I an apple fan? Well my laptop is a dell, my
PC at uni
and home are all 'self assembled' running SuSE and
vmWare ESXi and
M$.
PJ is right, and now my Phony detector is going into
overdrive as well. You make an unmitigated attack against
Samsung and Groklaw
and now start to back-peddle with even
more confused arguments. Where
exactly do you stand?
Who are you? Why are you here?
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