Although iPhone and iPad have a constant market success, it seems that the people at Apple do not digest very well the success of Galaxy S 4G and Galaxy Tab, the rival devices from Samsung. Therefore, Apple has filed, on April 15, a lawsuit against Samsung, accusing the Korean manufacturer of plagiarism asserting that it copied from Apple the patented technology, user interface and innovative style.
Apple attack
“Rather than innovate and develop its own technology and design for smartphones and tablets, Samsung chose to copy Apple’s technology, Apple’s graphical interface and its innovative style” – is shown in the background note introduced by Apple, a company that buys from Samsung a lot of components for iPhone, iPod, iPad and MacBook. An analysis of newspaper Wall Street Journal says that Apple is the most important customer of Samsung, the total value of purchased components (LCD displays, NAND flash memory and chipsets for mobile devices) exceeds $7.8 billion Dollars.
The 16 complaints filed by Apple in a court in San Francisco on 10 patents relate to the smartphones Epic 4G, Captivate, Indulge, Nexus S, Galaxy S 4G and the Galaxy Tab tablet and includes the operation, including gesture control method, the rectangular shape and aspect of the devices.
A similar action taken by Apple against Nokia and HTC has not been validated by the court nor by U.S. International Trade Commission.
According to analysts, who see Samsung as main competitor of Apple in terms of tablets, this is merely a disguised attack against Google and Android. The open source OS market share, included in the majority of Samsung’s products, exceeded the Apple system, iOS, estimated to reach, by the end of the year, 39.5% of the market, as opposed to 15.7% of the iOS, according to the IDC research company.
Samsung counter-attack
Samsung Electronics has countered quickly and opened lawsuits in Germany, Japan and South Korea – accusing Apple that it has no right to use certain patents. “Samsung is actively responding to actions taken against us, just to protect our intellectual property”, says the company release. The lawsuits relate to five patent infringement in regard to the optimization of data transmission and synchronization of the phone with the PC.
In the conflict between the two companies in recent days, users have intervened, too. According to Apple Insider, Android fans accuse the people at Apple that they copied Samsung products. In support of this statement, a viral document was released containing an infographics with a comparison between Samsung F700 terminal and a first generation iPhone.
“The graph is in error”, Apple fans have responded, claiming that Samsung’s F700 has not been officially presented at CeBIT 2006, but was mentioned as a future project, and it was launched in February 2007 at the 3GSM World Congress, one month after the iPhone was introduced at MacWorld.
In their favor, Apple fans show that, in 2006, Samsung had a product line similar to Nokia and that, one month after launching the iPhone, it has changed it radically.
The war between the two manufacturers is quite complicated due to the circumstances in which they conducted several joint contracts – Samsung is a leading provider of processors and LCD screens for Apple.
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