> And obviously the same thing holds for the Watch and the bigger iPhone: they were in development for at least a couple of years, iterating and refining them.

Sources or guessing?

I think the similarity of how the iWatch and the Android watches work is too similar to be a coincidence. There's some cool software work on Apple's watch, and I believe it'll generally be a better product overall. But it looks just like something somebody would make after seeing the competition and iterating an improvement on it. That's my assertion and I'm going to stick with it until somebody proves me wrong.

> Second, Samsung only started on their watches when rumours of an iWatch pending had already surfaced

IIR that's correct. iWatch rumors started and Samsung tossed together the Gear to get it out the door first. Apple didn't ship and now we're on Gen 2 of Android watches while Apple releases a nearly identical product...even down to some fairly small use-case details. I'm not poo pooing the device, with Apple's polish and tight integration I'd call it a Gen 2.5 smartwatch. It looks good, and going old-school Blackberry with the knob as an input device is a good idea. It's probably a full half-to-full generation ahead of the current Android devices for very Apple-y reasons.

But there's very little new here, and more important it's not all that different. It doesn't look like an independently developed device. It looks like a particularly well thought out Android smart watch. Apple could have...should have...gone a completely different direction with the watch, but they didn't.

Basically your story doesn't make any sense. The public story is that all Samsung knew was "Apple is working on a watch", and with that information, completely independently tossed together (with a little help from Google) a device that, in the Gen 2 version of Android Smartwatches, just so happens to work almost exactly like the iWatch minus the nub. From needing to tether, to use-cases, to display turn-on when raised, etc. There's a million different directions each watch development effort could have gone, yet both efforts coincidentally independently arrived at the same conclusion...with both teams operating in secret, probably on opposite sides of the planet.

The probably of that happen are only slightly less than throwing a bunch of parts into a dryer and at the end of the cycle getting a clock.

If Samsung developed the smartwatch based on nothing more than a rumor and just slapped it together, then they did one hell of a job because that's the template all new smart watches are currently following and they deserve a little more credit. If they copied Apple outright, then there's some serious leaks in Apple's R&D department.

But neither of those cases fits Occam's razor -- there are no coincidences...the similarities are too strong. It's more likely Apple has been mulling around a watch for a while. Samsung slapped together a watch based on a rumor, the gen 2 devices were pretty good and Apple simply went the direction with the idea that Samsung had pioneered. The only other conclusion is that Samsung committed one of the greatest acts of industrial espionage since the Soviets stole the designs for the atom bomb.

Note: I don't know why you're getting downvoted, we're just having a civil discussion. People get so emotional around Apple's stuff.