Hacker News Reader

Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

For a time, Samsung did a lot more than just make a rectangular device with touchscreen. They made eerily similar packing material, including the artwork, nearly identical power brick, etc. Hell, as I recall they even had their own version of the dock connector. It was all too blatant to be anything but deliberate.

View on HN

Famously, the judge in the IP case asked Samsung's attorney to ID which of the two tablets she was holding was the Samsung tablet and which was the Apple iPad and Samsung's attorney couldn't tell the difference between them...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-samsung-lawsuit/app...

To clarify: the judge was holding the devices, the lawyer was 10ft away:

> “Not at this distance your honor,” said Sullivan, who stood at a podium roughly ten feet away.

(I thought you meant the lawyer couldn't identify a tablet she was holding in her own hands)

Lawyers of HN, can the judge ask questions to a lawyer that can furnish evidence against their own client?

Yep, also don't forget this 132 page document where Samsung emails showed they were copying iOS features on left with their own UI on right comparing them to add those features to their own UI:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3227289/samsung-apple-ux-u...

I voluntarily owned the original iPhone 3g followed by the original Galaxy S. The similarities were very shallow in practice.

It did not have a dock connector, though the tablet did, but so did all sorts of media devices at the time.

Anytime this came up in conversation I'd hand people my Galaxy S and no one would call it a ripoff in person.

IIRC it was mostly the tablet that was a copy, not the phones.

So they used the same chipset, same battery, etc..

Or was it a "copy" like all media display devices follow a rectangular footprint with a frame?

It was a design copy. More than just having a similar footprint, too. Going from memory, it was the same size, screen, bezels, home button, dock connector, charger, and came in a box that looked just like the iPad box, was advertised with pictures that were nearly identical (technically different, but same gender, same colors, same pose, etc). It was actually pretty hilarious at the time because it was so over-the-top mimicking all the way down to details that you'd think nobody would bother with. At one point there was a great web site that just put them side-by-side and showed all the detailed copying. But it's been enough years that that seems to be lost to the dustbin of history, or at least my google fu is not strong enough to easily find it.

Samsung doesn't do anything like that now, they've long since found their own identify for all the Galaxy devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com