Lenovo just leapt past Apple to become the #2 smartphone seller in China, after Samsung. Guess what? Lenovo’s phone, the K800, looks exactly like the iPhone. Meaning: rectangular, with a glass screen, and a phone icon that looks like a phone and a mail icon that looks like an envelope. This must not stand! Especially since Apple’s share in China has fallen to 10 percent, despite the fact that the iPhone is the original smartphone and the best smartphone and can do magical, wonderful things. To be sure, Apple will regain share when the new iPhone 5 ships, since it will have a slightly longer screen, which will make it massively, magically more magical and spark a new boom in sales. Nevertheless, Lenovo must be punished.
Really? You’re away for over a month and this is the best you can come up with upon your return?
Do you even give a shit about your job anymore, Dan? People pay you for your insights?
>>Meaning: rectangular, with a glass screen, and a phone icon that looks like a phone and a mail icon that looks like an envelope.
I know you’ve been incredibly busy doing, well, something or other, but those actually spending some time covering the trial (and anyone who read any of that coverage) knows that the iPhone/Samsung litigation isn’t about a phone that is rectangular with a glass screen and two, maybe three, icon similarities. If you’re going to troll, at least troll better than hundreds of people in comment threads have already managed to troll. (In a more timely fashion, to boot.)
1) If you lay the contested Samsung phones next to the iPhone next to this Lenovo phone — one of them doesn’t look like the others. Anyone with eyes who isn’t trying his very hardest to be a boorish cynic can see that. The icons aren’t even remotely similar in style, the back of the phone appears to have PLEATS for God’s sake, there’s no obvious single button on the front, and the overall impression is of a device with 90-degree corners — the rounding isn’t even close to what you see on an iPhone OR the contested Samsung phones. It’s hard to tell, but I think the corners might actually be angled, rather than rounded.
2) Samsung has a history of hundreds-of-pages long documents laying out their phones vs. the iPhone and what exactly they should do to make their phone more like the iPhone and documentation of Google warning of infringement issues. Again, perhaps if you didn’t perpetually have your dial turned all the way up to “snark” you’d take some time to actually analyze the facts and provide some actual coverage.
3) I fully realize that you’ve long since decided that being a professional writer who barely tries and an amateur troll who tries too hard is how you want to live out your post “Fake Steve Jobs” life and that I’m doing little more than rewarding that behavior by responding. So be it.
Whether someone agrees with the trade dress litigation or not is one thing — there are valid reasons not to — to not understand (or to purposefully play dumb about) the facts involved in said litigation by making half-assed smug comparisons — as a purported professional journalist — is another thing altogether.
Try harder.
Thanks Brian. Dan is embarrassing himself once again like a particularly immature teenage boy.
“…the rounding isn’t even close to what you see on an iPhone OR the contested Samsung phones. It’s hard to tell, but I think the corners might actually be angled, rather than rounded.”
This is what patent protection is supposed to be about? Really? Surreal.
>>This is what patent protection is supposed to be about? Really? Surreal.
Who said that? Try to know more about the patents involved before commenting in the future.
ford prefect & monkey boy – what? every writer must now dance & bounce at the end of your string as you dictate? get real.
also, try edu-ma-cating yer ignorant selves as to what real enginners who write real code and produce the real innovation have to say about how the big tech comapnies are using their art as patent war heads in a u.s.patent system gone horribly awry. this is true for apple, google, microsquishie, yahoo, book-face, wotevz.
the take away: barring hardware real innovation, something like the IWM chip, software doesn’t need patents, it’s covered under copyright law in the EULAs. why do they pursue patenting everything, including gestures if yhe user picks their nose in between touching the screen? because the threat to competitors and possible pay out is huge.
in short, by current u.s. patent law (a gov’t office woefully understaffed and unknowledgable about the tech, real or vapor, they’re being asked to review), yes, apple won. thing is: it’s proof the system is broken when it goes this far. head over to a appliance store and look at current souped-up high-tech washing machines. you see sears, maytag, miele and westinghouse suing the crap outta each other for having the same buttons and features nearly all in the same place doing the same thing??
you taking dan to task for making a good point — that apple did this to make all else holding an android, or perhaps even a windows 8 phone, that comes close to the patents apple just used to do the deep crushing are now rushing to either change interface or cut a cross-license deal, with apple holding the 900-pound-gorilla upper hand — is an exercise in uninformed trolling.
in other words, yer a backbiting little ass hat. go blow.
>>ford prefect & monkey boy – what? every writer must now dance & bounce at the end of your string as you dictate? get real.
Clever. The fact that you write like someone in a remedial creative writing class makes me loathe to respond, but here goes…
>>also, try edu-ma-cating yer ignorant selves as to what real enginners who write real code and produce the real innovation
Apple’s engineers don’t write “real” code? If Apple’s multitouch and various mobile software patents aren’t very innovative, I’m left to wonder why so many companies are saying that they’re necessary to the form factor?
>>
>>in short, by current u.s. patent law (a gov’t office woefully understaffed and unknowledgable about the tech, real or vapor, they’re being asked to review), yes, apple won.
That’s the only law that matters. Samsung can’t appeal based on what you (or you cribbing the claims of real developers) thinks the law “ought” to be.
>>you taking dan to task for making a good point
I’m not. I’m taking him to task for making a dumb point.
>>in other words, yer a backbiting little ass hat. go blow.
You got me.
Nobody says that multitouch isn’t cool. It just wasn’t invented by Apple, it was known for the last twenty years, and the new capacitive screens, that Apple did not invent, made it feasible on a phone. The only thing that Apple did was steal the multitouch from the public domain.
Brian,
Your main comment was well thought, well written, and factual… Totally the opposite of what Dan wrote. Your follow ups were also well taken and a lot less hostile than I would have been in your shoes… LOL
To Nick, faddah, and the other 16 year olds living at home and posting here……
If you are trolling here, you are doing a VERY POOR job of it. Brian is totally right. And if you are not trying to troll, at least read some facts about the trial and patents etc before showing everyone how un-knowledgable you are.
Brian, keep up the good work.
Signed NASA engineer and happy Apple product user. Sadly, we use a pc network at work. But it does keep our IT people busy. LOL
Nick, just a thought. The first wagon type wheel maker did not invent the circle or wood or steel. But he did put them all together in a functional and useable fashion. Guess no one ever invented anything in the history of the world. Even cave men had rocks existing before they used them with sticks to make spears…
Just a though.