Apple has been dealing Samsung a barrage of complaints in its court case against Samsung, claiming the South Korean company has infringed on many of its iPhone and iPad design patents in creating the Galaxy series. As well as the talk of hardware, Apple has, to a lesser degree, had a question or two to ask of various UI elements, but to head off its defense, Samsung has countered by claiming Apple has infringed on a number of its own software-based patents.
Most of the attention of the technology loving world has been lavished on Apple and Samsung over the last two weeks, partly because they are the two largest smartphone vendors in the world and are currently actively competing against each for the top spot, but also due to the fact that they are currently locked in a fairly bitter legal dispute in California to resolve whether or not Samsung did indeed "slavishly" copy the design of the iPhone. As entertaining as the court case is, and as enjoyable as the information that it is unearthing, we should really try to step away from the fact that two of the industry’s largest names have had to go down this route and instead concentrate on the wonderful products they both offer.
With a larger-than-life 4.8” Super AMOLED HD display, a quad-core Exynos chip, 1GB of RAM (2GB in some variants), 8 MP / 2MP optics and being based on Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich, Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone - the Galaxy S III - is undoubtedly amongst the most powerful smartphones available today. It’s selling like hotcakes too, with over 10 million units sold in just two months since release (that’s about 190,000 units sold every day).
As well as revolutionizing the way we interact with technology, the development of the smartphone market post-iPhone and the tablet market since 2010's iPad release has really driven up the standards of hardware, and faster processors and GPUs are being produced at quicker intervals than ever before.
It will take weeks and months before the whole Apple vs. Samsung lawsuit in the USA gets resolved, and until then we’ll continue to receive juicy bits of insider information on both company’s design processes, prototypes for current products and plans for upcoming ones. Today, we’ve received news related to Apple’s previous intentions and efforts on striking a hefty per smartphone / tablet licensing deal with Samsung. Check out the details after the jump.
The Samsung Galaxy S III was one of the most highly-anticipated Android releases of this year, but after numerous purported sightings and inaccurate images of the device's final design, it was of much surprise that the device didn't ship in black. Sure, many vendors alter and omit various colors along the way, but the black shading of the device had been a standard feature of both the original Galaxy S and its predecessor, the immensely-popular Galaxy S II.
In early June, Samsung announced that they had sold over 7 million units of the Galaxy Note. It is perhaps the first huge smartphone / small tablet - which some like to call a phablet - to see reasonably good sales in the international market. Now, almost a year after its announcement and release, Samsung is all set to announce the next Galaxy Note which will have, from what we’ve heard, the innards of a Galaxy S III, and a slightly larger display.
The San Jose leg of the ongoing, worldwide battle between Apple and Samsung is really heating up, with pivotal members of both companies now taking the stand and offering their take on proceedings. For those of you who've been living in a cave for the past few months, Apple is claiming up to $2.5 billion in damages from Samsung regarding a wide range of alleged patent infringements, mostly circulated around the design of the Korean outfit's Galaxy design and form factor.
The Apple vs. Samsung court case has vacuumed the lion's share of the blogosphere's attention over the past couple of weeks, and with the key figures of both companies now getting involved, it's simply impossible to to be intrigued by the constantly-moving sequence of events. Scott Forstall, Senior Vice President of iOS Software and regular speaker at the WWDC keynote speeches, testified in the case last week, and now NetworkWorld has latched on to some intriguing information mentioned by Forstall months ago.
As Apple and Samsung's legal teams gear themselves up for another hard day in court, we sit patiently to see what little gems of information are next on the agenda to be released into the public domain. We have already seen Apple reveal prototype design information about the design iterations they went through in the early iPhone and iPad development stages, as well as a testimony from Phil Schiller and Scott Fortstall about how the company actually decided to design and build the two mobile devices.
