[Samsung Infuse 4G] Dani897:
the thing that gets me is that apple and ms stole the gui with pointer navigation and mouse control from xerox. not to mention all the prior existing art in sci-fi movies of touch interfaces and two point navigation of images (though in movies it's often 3d holograms that use two point manipulation). every artist and engineer with an imagination knew we would get to a point with touch integration and intuitive controls for 30+ years, tablets were in 2001 Space Odyssey in the 1960's, they were in star trek tng with a remarkable resemblance to a nook or ipad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVqHoGKQXLI tablets with stylus navigation looking similar to a very large palm pilot were used in the original series for the captains log, they were called electronic clipboards. and in tng were called a personal acess display device aka a "PADD" (coincidence?) and countless other examples in b movies not to mention microsoft introduced a tablet prototype in the year 2001 that aside from performance had just about all the ideas we see today. it's only natural for people to want to interact with computers like they interact with the world and for developers to want to create these things, the ideas are actually pretty old but the processing power wasn't afordable and battery friendly for a long time. i can remember having conversations with my brother as teenagers about the ideas of two point scaling and touch screens which is all the "pinch" is but touch screens were super expensive back then and i have no idea if they even supported multi touch. anyone who's ever thought about geometry or perspective could conceptualize it, how can someone patent that? samsung just had a week defense team because apple and microsoft beat cases like this pretty regularly, only they usually buy the other company to posses the patents, it's much easier (also google likely bought motorola for this reason, to not only posses patents to licence with the os but to sue apple for infringement resulting in licenses being issued to level the playing field). apple brought ideas to the mass market in the iphone sure but they didn't conceptualize it first and i'm certain they weren't the first to program it successfully either, it's not exactly theoretical physics we're talking about. apple is defending against it's own tactics which are taking good ideas that are already out there in the technology world and bringing them to the public. meanwhile they refuse to pay royalties for all the technologies they use. they think they should be able to pay less or nothing at all for using others patents based on their popularity.

i think it was quoted that apple was asking samsung for $40 per device to pay for licensing and samsung was ask $16 for the patents they hold. apple said they don't pay $16 to any company like it's an entitlement for them to pay less even though it is considered a fair price in the market. then they ask the unfair price of $40 based on the idea that the masses of ill informed consumers could mistake anything with a touch screen for an apple product? wtf apple! and in all of this they still rely on samsung hardware to keep up with the market. rumor is the i5 will have an exynos processor or an apple branded processor based on exynos 32 nm dies. so obviously they know samsung makes superior arm based processors.

edit: as far as the interface similarities go, well i dont see a problem with side by side pages, it's the same gesture you use when you read a book. the icon style and mms do look kinda iphone like but the idea that consumers saw that and bought the samsung is stupid. apple claims they lost $2.4 billion or something to galaxy s sales because of the alegidely infringed artwork is absurd. they lost sale to android because android is awesome. so many sales went to the sgs series becasue it had a good feel and it was the fastest device on the market, it was far from perfect but the touch screen was responsive and the glass was hard and smooth. if anything the of software changes samsung implimented to android the things that sold weren't the art it was the convieniences, the mms application is better integrate with contacts, you select contacts not type them, you slide for call/mms rather than go through another layer of menu. i know for me i bought an iphone 3g knowing about the g1 already only because i didn't have cash to buy a phone off contract, i wanted a smart phone that wasn't an iphone specifically an android but no suitable alternative was available on att! how can you put a figure on lost revenue when you can't know why people made x or y decision? it's not like the galaxy s was a cheaper alternative to where people said i want an iphone but this makes more sense. the captivate launched at $300 on contract though it quickly dropped to $200. how many galaxy s sale were because using the phone insired them to move up from a feature phone? how many people legitimately wanted an iphone but couldn't get one because apple refused to cater to t-mobile and sprint for so long? how many peowould actually say the sgs woudn't have been atractive if it weren't for the icons? how many people had iphones and got fed up with the control of the market, tethering, lack of bluetooth other than audio (what was with that? feature phones had better bt integration than ios2) slow network speeds, no mms, and countless other gripes of ios compared to the lesser known competition? the truth is apple in there hubris made the iphone too elite and too limited in features for most of the market and they have poluted their own minds to think they deserve the sales of the competition. it's actually insane to put a dollar value on sales they lost mostly based on what they failed to provide to people.