While I don't have any need for HDMI output on my phone, I applaud Samsung's efforts to add differentiating features. That said, adding an HDMI port falls short of the type of innovation to which I referred in my original comment.
Look at the following photo and tell me that Samsung didn't completely rip off the iPhone's look and feel, right down to the icon layout:
http://www.gadgetfolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Samsu...
Samsung had an opportunity to innovate in a way that would make the Galaxy S2 look and feel nothing like an iPhone and instead look and feel like a new, innovative product. They clearly didn't do that.
Comments like "My G2 has a back button unlike the iPhone" or "But the icons have square corners instead of rounded corners!!", in my opinion, completely miss the point. I'm not claiming that Samsung copies Apple's products down to the last molecule/pixel, nor do I believe that Samsung is incapable of adding ports/buttons that Apple chooses to omit.
The point is that Samsung is clearly trying their hardest to make their products look very similar to Apple's products. I personally believe Samsung should try to imbue their products with their own brand design/identity.
Why do people always compare the Applists? There are not many ways to display a list of icons in a meaningful way. The Windows Desktop has had a grid of icons for years and there was much else like that beforehand, but in addition the Android handsets offer more useful ways of using the screen when not starting apps(widgets&live backgrounds).
I won't admit that Samsung sure took inspiration from Apple, but that is true for most of the things, if not only because of usability reasons. There are just some design patterns that have proven to work and which people have come to expect. The race should be about who makes the best phone, not who made the first design patents.
Apple didn't have copy and paste on a mobile phone long after windows mobile had it... should microsoft have sued because of that?
I just want the best of all worlds and Samsung delivers there. If they have to stop selling the Galaxies in Europe, i'd import them from Asia.
Pointing out one of these things and saying "Should Apple have a monopoly on X?" is, once again, missing the point. It's the combination of X, Y, and Z that makes the product look like an iPhone instead of a differentiated product.
Defending this practice with "There aren't many ways to do X" doesn't seem like a very persuasive argument. Before the iPhone was introduced, companies seemed to find a myriad of ways to do these same things. Once the iPhone became overwhelmingly popular, however, companies like Samsung stopped trying to raise the bar and just made their products as Apple-like as possible.
So to reiterate my original point, I think Samsung should differentiate their design functions and aesthetics instead of mimicking Apple. Samsung isn't going to hit the ball out of the park if they keep making conservative bets -- they should take some chances.
But as I said from the very beginning, the common good is better served without all this software patent litigation crap. As much as I think Samsung does itself a disservice by mimicking Apple so closely, it probably should be regulated to a moral question rather than a legal one.
The device is always going to have corners; are Apple the only ones who are allowed to evenly round the corners? I'm viewing this on a Samsung monitor, which has evenly rounded corners...
I don't deny the Samsung device has similarities, but... Apple have gone out of their way to make the iPhone look very, very generic quite frankly. Call it minimalist if you want, but it has so few visible features as a piece of hardware that if you're going to produce a competing device then there really aren't very many ways to make sure it doesn't look at least slightly like one or other design generation of iPhone.
> Look at the following photo and tell me that Samsung
> didn't completely rip off the iPhone's look and feel,
> right down to the icon layout
> Samsung had an opportunity to innovate in a way that
> would make the Galaxy S2 look and feel nothing like an
> iPhone and instead look and feel like a new, innovative
> product. They clearly didn't do that.
> Comments like "My G2 has a back button unlike the iPhone"
> or "But the icons have square corners instead of rounded
> corners!!", in my opinion, completely miss the point.
> The point is that Samsung is clearly trying their hardest to make their
> products look very similar to Apple's products.
You can unless the difference is attributable to Samsung. The back button was present on Android prototypes in 2007. Samsung didn't hop on the Android bandwagon until 2009.
A grid of icons with text underneath is considered *ripping off*
Apple now? Are you serious?
It's not just the app icon layout. It should be obvious to any
casual observer just how many things Samsung copied: the
highlighting on the bottom row of icons, the dots that represent
different pages of apps, the overall aesthetics of the handset
itself, etc.
Pointing out one of these things and saying "Should Apple have a
monopoly on X?" is, once again, missing the point. It's the
combination of X, Y, and Z that makes the product look like an
iPhone instead of a differentiated product.
Have you actually used a Samsung Android phone? The "look and
feel" is nothing like an iPhone. [...] Just because one screen
happens to look similar to an iPhone doesn't mean the entire UI
is copied.
You can not say on one hand that Samsung is incapable of
differentiating their product, and then wave away all the ways in
which their product is differentiated.
In any case, I'm guessing we disagree on how much differentiation Samsung has done here, but different opinions are what make the world go 'round. :)
Recall that iOS 5 has been announced with a notification tray
that is a carbon copy of Android's notification tray. Taking good
features from the competition and iterating on them is par for
the course.
why would you expect these two products to be differentiated on every feature? do you actually expect two touch screen phones to be different in every way? is it ridiculous that iphone's voice calling feature (where you can talk, and someone on the other side can hear you) is a "carbon copy" of old dumb phones?
Maybe that's a small nit, but Samsungs's home screen looks nothing at all like the iPhone. You have to go to the less used "applications list screen" on their phones and compare that to the iPhone's default home screen so that they look similar. It is less used because on android you put you most accessed stuff on the main screen and click the icons/widgets form there.
Here is a pic: http://www.itworld.com/sites/default/files/iPhone_vs_Galaxy-...
Left is iPhone's main screen, middle is Samsung's application list (I heard it repeated so much even I used to think that was Samsung's home screen), right is Samsung's actual home screen which is very different.
People keep using this same argument, but there's a little more too it than that. For example, if a graphic designer took the Coca-Cola logo and changed it just slightly. By your logic, they are in the clear because it's just "type", it's not like Coca-Cola invented fonts, right?
I think most people agree that there are enough similarities between the phones that it could be confusing, hence Apple is trying to protect it. You don't hear anyone complaining that MS ripped off Apple. MS came up with something that is different. All though it's still just a "grid of icons with text underneath".