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PJ
Authored by: calris74 on Tuesday, August 07 2012 @ 12:01 AM EDT
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?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Engineers can spell.
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 07 2012 @ 01:29 PM EDT
"And this is my point, see, I'm a over 50+ electronic engineering"

I think you mean Electronic Engineer. And that's where I stopped believing
you.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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