It's fair to say, given the courtroom history and market face-offs between the two, that a certain amount of friction, animosity and contempt exists between Apple and Samsung. The two companies were at loggerheads last year in a court hearing which saw Apple reign supreme over its bitter rival, but with a new trial taking place this year in the same San Jose location, issues have by no means been resolved. As a very relevant subplot, Apple has never been shy of dragging Google into proceedings, and following on from the Cupertino's recent demands to see the Android source code as part of the hearing, Tim Cook's legal bureaucrats have now dragged both the newly-released Samsung Galaxy S4 and Google Now into the equation.
It's no secret that Apple and Samsung are far from the best of friends. In fact, it's fair to say that they don't like each other at all, one bit, which is probably why Samsung's entire advertising campaign for any new smartphone seems to revolve around bashing the iPhone more than bigging up the latest and greatest from South Korea, see the latest Galaxy S4 TV ads, for example.
S Voice for Galaxy S III may look and work a lot like Siri for iPhone 4S, but it has been shown in multiple tests that both voice-based services are, in most ways, inferior to Google Now that comes built-in with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
While the cool thing to do is typically compare S Voice or Google Now with Apple's own personal assistant, Siri, Clayton Ljungberg of AndroidAuthority has decided to pit the two brotherly voice assistant services to see which one is the best.
Samsung's Galaxy S III announcement was either a roaring success or an abysmal failure, depending on your affiliations. Regardless of your feelings on the phone or indeed that whacky announcement event, what you cannot ignore is the fact that Samsung's software is arguably the star of the show. Or that was the plan.
Samsung's announcement of the Galaxy S III today has come after weeks, nay, months of speculation about what the hardware will look like from top to bottom. What size screen will it use, how big will the body be, and what cameras will it pack? Now all those questions have been answered, we are left with something possibly even more interesting than all of that - the software.
