News - UK Court orders Apple to advertise 'Samsung did not copy'

[crossy]

This is ridiculous, making a mockery of the British legal system..why is supposed to be more sensible/logical than the american or EU courts..but clearly not.

Agreed, Apple UK should have NEVER cluttered up the courts with such a superficial and malicious piece of nonsense.

First of all a Judge making a clear comment as "Your device is not as cool as Apples"...what? Is there now a legal definition of cool? Then forcing Apple to advertise that the Galaxy Tab was not a poor clone of the iPad..again what kind of punishment is that? Absolutely ridiculous.

This isn't the first time I've heard a judgement use that kind of "street" terminology - it seems to have escaped into the courts as a kind of shorthand for "more desirable/fashionable to the man-in-the-street". As to punishment - were you advocating a fine for Apple would be more appropriate?
Ignoring who was doing the defaming, having to issue a retraction and apology seems to be de rigeur for these kinds of name calling cases - so I fail to see how that fact that it was Apple doing the potty mouthing makes any difference. You're surely not arguing that they deserve legal immunity? lol

The judge may be correct - the iPad is clearly cooler than any Android device when referring to the general public,

"Cooler" in the sense of more fashionable undoubtedly - only a complete Android fanboy (or despiser of Apple) would argue otherwise. That said, a cynic may argue that this is due to the sheer amount of advertising done by Apple - brand/product awareness.

and although Samsung's Android UI layer is a blatant copy of the iOS home screens, it's just about different enough to get away with it in a purely legal sense.

Sorry, I'm not sure whether you're being humorous there or not - I'm assuming you're making a joke that I'm too dumb to pick up since I can't believe that someone of your undoubted technical abilities believes even 1% of that pile of BS you give above.

Plus of course once you deviate off the home screen you are thrown into the usual myriad of complicated [to the average user, not geeks] Android config screens and menus, so legally they are pretty safe.

See previous comment. Put it this way ... I've seen 10 year olds (both in my house and in Argos/HMV/Comet etc figure out the ICS way of working in mere minutes (or in some cases less than a minute).
ANDROID/ICS ... IS ... NO ... MORE ... DIFFICULT ... TO ... USE ... THAN ... IOS.
Or are you dumber than a 10 year old? (not something I'm willing to believe judging on your excellent past posts)

Rant over folks...

[dangel]

Samsung's touchwiz UI was very close to iOS at one time (not so much now). It's also bloody horrible(this is still true). ICS and on Android's default look and feel is wonderful - and in many ways so much better than iOS. Neither are difficult to use but one offers far better functionality thesedays and is part of the reason why I find my iPad 3 so frustrating when I use both on a daily basis.

[Spud1]

I won't quote but will reply to some points, but its safe to say we disagree on this issue and have done many times

In general we agree that Apple should never have got so far in the process with this, in the UK (it's different in the USA where their patent law is fundamentally broken). They clearly didn't have a case under UK law, and it should not have gone so far. The fact that it was Apple is immaterial - could have been anyone and I would be saying the same thing. When I said the iPad was cooler, I did mean in terms of more fashionable (cool/fashion are linked in most cases imo) - that doesn't mean better of course!

I am not being humorous about Touchwiz (Thanks dangle for reminding me of its name) being similar to iOS (at least in previous incarnations) - It's hard to find an unbiased comparison to link to (you tend to either find ones that make it look identical or those that make it look radically different, depending on the site) but if you take an unbiased look, the Touchwiz homescreen UI and icons were clearly modelled after iOS. There is nothing wrong with this whatsoever - happens all the time with all technology..in fact it has to or we'd not have such a vast amount of choice in the marketplace, but the fact remains that it appears the designers were heavily influenced by the iOS design + popularity. That sort of thing IS protectable in some circumstances under US law, which is partly why this has gone so far imo.

My comment around the usability + appearance of Android once you get beyond the OEM front end is my own view and that of others - not that its difficult or confusing, but its not as intuitive as iOS, simply by the fact it allows you to do more. It definitely doesn't look as impressive (talking stock Android here) or as "wizzy" as my grandfather calls it, but I would bet a sizeable amount of money that if you took a random person off the street who had never used a smartphone before, gave them a Galaxy S3 + iPhone 4S and told them to find the wifi settings and enable it, they would do it faster on an iPhone. Kind of irrelevant though ;-)

Can't deny that a Droid device does more out of the box without installing 3rd party apps than any iOS device - but I start to digress from the main point!

[crossy]

I won't quote but will reply to some points, but its safe to say we disagree on this issue and have done many times

Touche - and as usual put in adult/sensible terms. (c.f. if I'd done the same on The Register then I probably would have had my parentage questioned - but that's by the by). Apologies then for the quotage I'm going to indulge in.

In general we agree that Apple should never have got so far in the process with this, in the UK (it's different in the USA where their patent law is fundamentally broken). They clearly didn't have a case under UK law, and it should not have gone so far. The fact that it was Apple is immaterial - could have been anyone and I would be saying the same thing. When I said the iPad was cooler, I did mean in terms of more fashionable (cool/fashion are linked in most cases imo) - that doesn't mean better of course!

iPad's ARE more fashionable and, as much as I may be unhappy about this, I don't really see anything from either Android vendors or Microsoft really challenging this. Yes, there are quite a lot of technically "better" devices, but only a fool (which I'd like to think I'm not) would fail to acknowledge the mind-share that Apple's earned.

I am not being humorous about Touchwiz (Thanks dangle for reminding me of its name) being similar to iOS (at least in previous incarnations) - It's hard to find an unbiased comparison to link to (you tend to either find ones that make it look identical or those that make it look radically different, depending on the site) but if you take an unbiased look, the Touchwiz homescreen UI and icons were clearly modelled after iOS.

Actually, I remember seeing some article claiming that TouchWiz was actually patterned on a certain 3rd party launcher, unfortunately I've not got the link to hand, otherwise I'd be a little more specific. Perhaps - if true of course - Apple "borrowed" some of that launcher for later iOS revisions? Or maybe that 3rd party "borrowed" iOS features - I don't know.
I've heard a lot of bad press about TouchWiz and Sense, and while I prefer "raw" ICS (like dangel), the latest TouchWiz is "usable". Sense - at least as implemented on the One S - is downright confusing for someone who's ICS-familiar.

My comment around the usability + appearance of Android once you get beyond the OEM front end is my own view and that of others - not that its difficult or confusing, but its not as intuitive as iOS, simply by the fact it allows you to do more. It definitely doesn't look as impressive (talking stock Android here) or as "wizzy" as my grandfather calls it, but I would bet a sizeable amount of money that if you took a random person off the street who had never used a smartphone before, gave them a Galaxy S3 + iPhone 4S and told them to find the wifi settings and enable it, they would do it faster on an iPhone. Kind of irrelevant though ;-)

As you say, we're going to agree to disagree - I've no problem with that, doesn't mean I don't respect your opinion greatly. Although I'm going to agree with you on one thing - for the basic operations iOS probably does still hold an (slight?) edge - e.g. music player on iOS is superior to the stock Android one - no question. Conversely when you use your phone more - and therefore get into more "technical" activities - I'm going to argue that Android's "flexibility" returns the edge to it. Which, as far as I'm concerned, leaves an effective stalemate - neither is overall better than the other. E.g. if my needs were basic then an iPhone would be my choice (shock!), but I have need of the more advanced features, which is why I'm an Android owner.

[chelseascum]

So where are this open advertisement, then?

http://www.apple.com/uk/search/?q=samsung&section=global&geo=uk