Day 2 is underway in the Apple v. Samsung case in The Netherlands, a microcosm of what would have happened in Germany, had Germany implemented the concept of due process. Most interesting bit so far? Samsung is using the Knight Ridder tablet from 1994 as a case of prior art. I was unaware of this device, but be sure to watch the video – this is an iPad. Amazing. This doesn’t actually surprise me though – my father worked at a large newspaper company his entire life until he retired a few years ago, and in the early ’90s, he already attended demonstrations of devices like this, taking home promotional material that amazed my child brain. This was supposed to be the future of newspapers, until development on these kinds of devices suddenly halted – my father never understood why. Update: Forgot to mention that like yesterday, Andreas Udo de Haes, editor at WebWereld.nl, present in the court room, is covering this. This time, in English. Update II: Samsung has presented 20 cases of prior art for both tablets and smartphones. Update III: I’m liking Samsung’s lawyers.
Oh, I feel Apple will be crying
I wasn’t aware of the previous Knight Ridder, but for sure the tablet form factor is old, and now finally someone shows that it’s not real inovation.
I really hope that Apple will be turned down on this one. Maybe they get back on creating better products, not on fighting in the court.
They do have a better product. It’s well rated, they’re selling them faster than they can make them and the competition is struggling to offer an equal experience.
That playing field may level, sure, but Apple are trying to put a stop to that early on. If the market becomes awash with a mass of tablets, it only waters down their message.
Apple can compete, they just don’t want to have to get to that. They want to be permanently ahead of the market by crippling any competition first, before it becomes real competition. They’ve seen how the PC market played out in the 80s and don’t want a repeat that left Apple in last place and close to dying.
[citation needed]
Not really.
Edited 2011-08-11 11:54 UTC
Yes, really. The have good products. But if they’re “better” is very much debatable.
Also, better for whom? Not for me, that’s for sure. I’d sooner take an Android tablet. Well, I wouldn’t take a tablet at all, I much prefer a netbook.
Obviously it’s very hard for anyone to show that “Apple” don’t have better products.
It comes down to preference I guess. I have used the new Samsung Galaxy S2 (which I was hoping to like as we are getting them for development here) and a couple of new Honeycomb Tablets.
I have to say the tablets were not that great, esp. if you have used an iPad 2 before (personally, I don’t see the point of tablets, I don’t own any myself, but use an iPad 2 from work occasionally).
The Galaxy S2 phone left me very uninspired. I’m not sure Apple should worry about it, it’s size is bigger than an iPhone and the iPhone just seems so much easier to use.
But again, that’s just my preference. The mate who showed me the Galaxy owns an iPhone 4 as well, but prefers the Galaxy, well, at least, last time I checked 🙂
The alternative angle: I got so fed up with the limitations on my iPad that I sold it to a friend, and put the proceeds towards an Asus Transformer. haven’t looked back. Android tablets are just that much more versatile. iPads are great tools for consuming information, but despite all the product demos, I wouldn’t want to create anything on one. I found the iWork suite to be slow and cumbersome, while with Quickoffice on my Transformer (I’m aware, you can get Quickoffice on the iPad, too), I routinely do things like new D&D character sheets, re-jig my resume, do mum’s budget in spreadsheets and such. The Transformer is very much a PC replacement. My laptop has been relegated to games and movies.
The really cool thing is the price, and the battery life. The tablet itself only costs $399 US (it may have dropped by now, actually, I bought it at launch), and the keyboard dock, $149. Both the tablet and the dock each have a 24 Watt hour battery in them, and the tablet can be charged from the dock. Unlike the iPad’s keyboard dock, this one is part of the portable kit, it’s not a desktop fixture, and when you put the tablet into the dock it becomes a mini laptop. The price difference may not seem like much, to people buying in America, but Apple have a “fuck the rest of the world” policy on their pricing, and the iPad 2 launched here at closer to AU$800. Including shipping and shipping insurance, and the keyboard dock, the Transformer cost me AU$600, at the time. When I bought my iPad 1, around about August the previous year, I think it was, it cost me just OVER $800 total, and that’s without any accessories besides the ($50!) case.
Oh, and the really cool thing: External storage. The Transformer has a micro SD slot, the dock has a full size one, and two proper USB Host ports. The only things that haven’t worked in those, for me, have been a couple of Logitech gamepads, though I haven’t tried them since before 3.1 rolled out, and it’s now running 3.2!
Didn’t you say it was?
I understand the injunction in the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent the EU, is more important to you since you happen to live there, but do you have any more coverage on the exact same thing happening in Australia? I wouldn’t know for sure, but I think it’s rare that patent cases get brought to bear here, since if patent infringement can be confirmed in an American court, the company won’t bother releasing here anyway.
Better for which purposes?
Better for whom?
Why? Because you are forced to use only one app store with applications approved by the big brother as opposed to choosing between app stores or even better putting the app on the microSD card and running it from there? Wait! The superior tablet doesn’t even have a microSD card. And why do you have to go through iTunes to access your files? Why can’t you have direct access to your own files?
What message exactly would that be?
And if they really have a better product, what exactly are they afraid of?
What is wrong with competition these days? Can you imagine a paper factory blocking competitors because their products are also white, thin, rectangular, and something to write on? Can you imagine if someone blocked anything similar to a box on four wheels? Can you imagine we had patents 10000 years ago and someone blocked the design of a round wheel? Hey, it’s ok if you make a wheel too, we are not anti-competitive here, just don’t make it look round like ours.
This isn’t a trademark issue. You cannot mistake an iPad for a Samsung tablet because it is clearly labeled as such. Samsung doesn’t try to sell its tablets as iPads, it tries to compete.
It’s always been like this: a company makes a product based on ideas they’ve seen elsewhere, along with some of their own too. A competitor shows up, takes some good ideas from the first company, adds their own ideas and releases a competing product. This forces both companies to keep improving. Ultimately this should result in the best product (or most wanted product) for everyone.
So where are all these free market liberals you used to see? Most discussions are now overwhelmed by Apple fans trying to defend something that directly violates the core of our economy. It actually saddens me that people can be so blind for a company. Abuse should be severely punished, it doesn’t matter if it’s Apple, Microsoft, Google or the pope.
Did someone consider filing a complaint to Nelie Kroes yet?
Companies, especially large ones, only want free markets and competition as long as they are the underdog.
That’s rather subjective and market share is not a measurement of quality. If it was DOS must have been vastly superior to MacOS.
I agree with everything else though.
Selling them faster is the only fact in this statement, everything else is your opinion (and quite wrong one too)
I believe you were trying to say “water down their profits”, no? As for the message, Apple has no clue what so ever. Thay are masters of lying, stealing, etc.
History shows that they cannot compete, that is why they are resorting to litigation.
And in the other corner…
Go’s to show OSnews editors are not all one sided.
Thom, Hadrian on the left, David in the middle, Croc on the right.
I’ve played with an iPad*, and I just cannot agree that its a better product. It is heavy and cumbersome. I worry whenever I put it on a surface that it will be scratched or will scratch. The tilt sensors often trigger at flat angles so i’m often tilting the device to return it to where I want it – having a lockâ€screen toggle is a cop out. I hope the touch sensor is much better on the iPad2 because I find I hit the wrong targets more often than not – in Safari or Sodoku. It doesn’t have USB.
The only thing I think iPad does better than say, Tab 10.1, is having the app download progress in the app drawer.
iPad has the advantage of being ‘first’ to market, and has gobbled up a large amount of people who would buy a tablet. In a penetrated market, it is harder to judge competing devices and their sales figures because they aren’t just having to stand on their own merit.
*My father won an iPad at a security conference (lol).
Or so people claimed. I feel Apple is more like WINTEL (Microsoft and Intel combined) at it’s worse, with a sprinkle of SCO. I’ve never seen a company acting remotely this bad before.
Yeah, with this type of behaviour I am glad that Apple always remained a minor player.
Can you imagine how bad IT would be if Apple managed to be half of the size from Microsoft with this type of behaviour?
Aren’t they twice the size by now?
Only in overvalued stock. Not in real muscle.
You’d be surprised who has the real muscle when it comes to IT.
Apple, Microsoft and Google are not even in the Top 10. With apple being the least important of all…
LG has blatantly stolen the exact design of the iPad:
http://portables.about.com/od/portabledvd/a/lgdp889fl.htm
http://www.cybertheater.com/lg-dp889-portable-dvd-playerdigital-fra…
Ooops. LG sold this DVD player in 2008…
http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/78065/78065,122…
… paint the border in black, and tada !
If Apple decide to design a TV, they better not make it look like a Samsung one then.
I really don’t understand what Apple is doing. First they want to halt the Xoom because of community design and now they want ahhh…this is really bothering me. Why Apple, why are doing stuff like this when you are like most popular kid on the block?
I could be wrong, but I suspect this is a case of Apple making sure it gets there first… If there are crappy patent laws and “Community Design” which can be used to stop a company from selling a product, you can guarantee that someone *WILL* use them and if Apple doesn’t use them first, someone else will use ten against Apple.
Not trying to exhonourate Apple here, but I would put money on Samsung’s lawyers kicking themselves for not finding this “Community Design” thing first. I don’t blame any company for using these crappy laws/patents/etc… It’s our fault (not us personally), as we voted in our law makers (actually my choice has never been elected, but still).
Edited 2011-08-11 16:39 UTC
“Not trying to exhonerate Apple here”, just trying to exhonerate Apple here.
By this logic, the US should do a nuclear strike against China so that China can’t bomb them first if a psychopath arrives at the head of the country.
Some weapons shouldn’t be used, or even manufactured. And it’s the same with some legal artillery really. Main difference is, laws can be suppressed in a relatively straightforward way, whereas there’s no sure way to make all nuclear weapons disappear from the face of the Earth.
Edited 2011-08-11 20:51 UTC
They may not have invented the concept of ‘being douchebags’ but they sure are doing their best to perfect it.
I really hope these kind of revelations put an end to the bullshit of Apple inventing anything. They are great at creating polished products and enhancing existing ideas, yet they will use any legal bs they can come up with to prevent others from doing the same.
If you want to go further back in time there was the GridPad introduced in 1989. It used a pen for input, but even so a rectangular shaped keyboardless thin computer.
I though it was a tablet from the old David Hasslehoff show, Knight Rider. Although a cool, corny 80’s show, I don’t see it as prior art. Maybe they can do something about any patents on the Google self driving cars too….
“this is an iPad”
What I see by watching that Knight Ridder video is a pen based e-reader. The iPad is the sum of it features and how they are implemented. This covers the physical design, interface design, the ability to run apps and browse the web with finger input and respond to other physical senors such as the accelerometer, gyroscope, proximity, voice, etc…. it’s how all these things are combined and presented that make the difference. This is a poor example of “prior art”. A windows based tablet would make a better subject but of course that is not an iPad either. Maybe they should just show a few classic Star Trek episodes.
That said, I strongly believe all software and process patents should be abolished – pure evil.
Edited 2011-08-12 02:29 UTC
You’re missing something: we’re not talking functionality. This case is not based on patents. It’s based on looks.
The Knight Ridder (and many other devices) look very much like the iPad and preceed it by many years. That makes it excellent prior art from the design viewpoint.
The Community Designs in the EU are currently stupid. Apple is abusing a very broken system. I hope the decision gets overturned and the designs system overhauled. Not sure if Apple can get slapped with a fine (after all, they were using an existing system within the rules and law of the EU, it’s not like they did anything illegal) — but I’d sure like that.
They’re not content with having the best product, they’re not content with making incredible amounts of money, now they want to kill competition completely? That’s crossing the line; they went from “justifiably arrogant” into “insane megalomaniac” territory.
However, I don’t believe Jobs is insane or stupid. So I’m chucking this down as a strategic move. Even if they get a hefty fine, Apple can afford it (got tons of cash). What they wanted is to slow down the spread of the Samsung Tab and they achieved that. It will take Samsung months to get their 10″ tablets moving again, possibly missing the 2011 Xmas.
Edited 2011-08-12 08:50 UTC
Such a bummer. Apple’s plans busted