John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Samsung on Its iPhone-Envy Memo: Nothing to See Here, Move Along

Samsung says a seemingly inflammatory document entered into evidence Tuesday in its patent trial with Apple isn’t a gun at all, let alone a smoking one.

In a statement given to AllThingsD this morning, a company spokesperson said the document is a “typical competitive analysis,” something “routinely” performed by companies across many industries.

Written in 2010 by Samsung’s product engineering team, the massive document is a screen-by-screen comparison of the iPhone and the Galaxy S I, illustrating what Samsung believed to be the latter’s design failures, and offering suggestions for improvements based on Apple’s UI.

Essentially, it’s a Samsung document making the case that the original Galaxy would be better if it behaved more like the iPhone and featured a similar user interface. And as Apple presents it, it speaks directly to the company’s allegations that Samsung “slavishly copied” the iPhone’s trade dress. Samsung had fought like hell to keep the document excluded from trial, but now that it has been entered into evidence, it is downplaying it as immaterial.

“Samsung benchmarks many peer companies,” the Samsung spokesperson told AllThingsD. “In fact, these are typical competitive analyses routinely undertaken by many companies in many industries — including Apple. Samsung stands by its culture of continuous improvement and innovation. We are very proud of the product innovations driven by our more than 50,000 designers and engineers around the world who have made Samsung’s products the products of choice.”


Apple versus Samsung Full Coverage

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik