Samsung Drops European Injunction Requests Against Apple 71
An anonymous reader writes with this IDG News report:
"Samsung dropped all claims pending in European courts in which it asserted patents that are essential for mobile communication devices to prevent the sales of Apple products in Europe. The injunction requests against Apple, which aimed to get courts to impose sales bans on infringing products, were withdrawn in the U.K., France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. Samsung only withdrew the injunctions requests — other litigation against Apple in Europe continues, Anne ter Braak, a spokeswoman for Samsung in the Netherlands, said in an email on Tuesday. While Samsung said it withdrew its claims in the interest of protecting consumer choice, it could have to do with a European antitrust investigation."
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Informative)
Ugh. Enough of this backwards justification for this crap.
Do a few minutes of 5th-grader-level research and you'll find that there were more than a few phones/pdas/whatever that had touch screens with grids of icons before the iPhone existed. The tech simply wasn't cheap (or cool) enough yet. Apple was simple in the right place at the right time.
Your memory of how things got to where we are now is fuzzy at best. :/
Re:Who cares (Score:2, Informative)
All of the Palms had grids of icons, but I have the Palm that was contemporary with the first iPhone, and the experience just can't be compared without writing a 7 page post. The web experience on the Palm was utterly atrocious. There was a convoluted way to get Opera Mini to run after installing some Java stuff on it, but you still had this terrible resistive touch screen and stylus-focused OS. There is a reason that Palm abandoned that software platform, and it had nothing to do with "cool".
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, so let's just pretend for a second that I didn't specify any other device types or reasons in my very short example. Let's also ignore the mental acrobatics you performed to disregard the remainder of that chunklet of information I posted in a seemingly feeble attempt at steering the clearly biased back toward the gray area within which the rest of us live.
Let's pretend all of that. Even still, you're saying that the iPhone was a technological evolution of devices that were not only already in existence, but established enough that there were known workarounds for the seemingly terrible user experience.
Even if that were exactly the case, to hold Apple so highly for their "accomplishments" that you feel they're justified in suing everyone else for "stealing" mind-numbingly obvious IP is sociopathic at best.
Look, If you guys enjoy living within the walled garden of Apple, great. I'm happy for you. However, to think they somehow developed everything in a vacuum and everything to come after is a mindless copy... Jesus Christ, man.