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New iPhones, new Galaxies: Who's the Bigger Copycat? (yahoo.com) 149

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
David Pogue: Apparently, a lot of people hang their identities on what phones they carry. An iPhone person might feel personally affronted when a Samsung Galaxy gets a great review, and vice versa. Apple and Samsung just introduced their new fall 2018 smartphones, and it's clearer than ever: all smartphones have pretty much the same features. Therefore, it strikes many people as searingly important to remember which brand had those features first.
OS Features: Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it. The original 2007 iPhone brought us multitouch (pinch to zoom), an on-screen keyboard, auto-rotate, lists that scroll as though with momentum, and the apps-on-a-Home-page design that we all use to this day. Not surprisingly, then, Apple wins this category, having introduced 13 ideas, compared to Android's 10 (and Samsung's 1). The screen is the first thing you notice when you turn on a phone --how big, bright, and gorgeous it is. You can read the full review here. The final verdict: Apple leads the invention category, with 44 innovations, according to our calculations. Google's Android comes in second, with 31. And Samsung brings up the rear with 12 innovations. Now, if you count the number of times each company is listed as a Follower in the spreadsheet, you discover that Apple also seems to have stolen the most ideas. In part, that's because I'm pitting Apple against Google/Samsung (its phones use Google's software). As a result, no feature ever lists Google and Samsung as innovator+follower, or vice versa; they're always a single team.
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New iPhones, new Galaxies: Who's the Bigger Copycat? More

New iPhones, new Galaxies: Who's the Bigger Copycat?

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  • Still Nokia features left to copy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14, 2018 @11:31AM (#57314050)

    They both are still "innovating" things that were present in Nokia phones 10 years ago.
    Brilliant.

    • Such as the ability to stay in business?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Such as the ability to stay in business?

        Pretty sure Nokia would be in business had they not been bought, and then shuttered, by Microsoft.

        Pretty sure they were doing fine until they became a victim of Microsoft trying to get into the phone industry.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Im pretty sure Nokia is just fine. They; unlike apple ; do a lot more then just phones.

          • Im pretty sure Nokia is just fine.

            Not in the mobile phone handset market they aren't. They technically sort of still exist but they are a fraction of a ghost of what they once were. They used to have over 50% marketshare in what passed for a smartphone 10 years ago. This number is not a decent approximation of zero. That's a long way to fall.

            They; unlike apple ; do a lot more then just phones.

            Apple has hundreds of billions in cash available to them. Apple can overnight buy their way into nearly any industry they care to get involved in. They could buy Ford AND GM AND Tesla in cash if t

        • Nokia crapped the bed (Score:4, Insightful)

          by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Friday September 14, 2018 @01:10PM (#57314670)

          Pretty sure Nokia would be in business had they not been bought, and then shuttered, by Microsoft.

          Unlikely. Nokia was already suffering from a bunch of self inflicted wounds before they got in bed with Microsoft. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that Symbian or MeeGo would have gained meaningful traction in the market. They lost a march to Apple and Google in operating systems and never really caught up. Partnering with Microsoft wasn't in principle a terrible idea but it was horribly executed. If I had been a shareholder in either company I would have been incredibly angry. I've seen very few companies crap the bed quite as hard as Nokia did around 2008-2012.

          Pretty sure they were doing fine until they became a victim of Microsoft trying to get into the phone industry.

          No they were not. The moment the iPhone dropped Nokia's market share in smartphones started to fall and as Android picked up it just got worse. It's not clear whether they could have fended off iOS and Android but it was very clear that they were no longer "doing fine" even at the time.

          They might have still managed somehow but once the Burning Platform memo was issued they basically announced publicly that their current products had no future while they had no replacement based on Microsoft's system ready to ship for a long time after that. It was one of the most insanely stupid blunders I've ever seen.

      • Nokia is still around.

        Sure, they had a bit of a ride. They were bought by Microsoft, forced to build Windows Phones, and then spun back off into an independent company.

        But you can buy Nokia phones today, and they are solid, reliable, no-fluff devices. I bought my girlfriend a Nokia 6 to replace an ancient iPhone, and she's been quite happy with it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by MatthiasF ( 1853064 )

      The list of Apple achievements is vastly exaggerated as well and reads like an Applefan made it.

      Many manufacturers had designs in prototype that looked similar to Apple's first iPhone design. This was shown in the Apple vs Samsung court proceedings, but the LG Prada phone has the distinction of being the first phone to have the now standard capacitive touchscreen focused design.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      It also had auto-rotate and apps-on-a-Home-page design. It didn't have an on-screen keyboard at la

  • Please (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nwaack ( 3482871 ) on Friday September 14, 2018 @11:34AM (#57314072)
    95% of the hardware features on ALL smartphones over $200 are basically the same now. At this point it's really just a matter of what type/quality camera(s) you want that makes them different.

  • Hyped up much? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dasher42 ( 514179 ) on Friday September 14, 2018 @11:36AM (#57314084)

    I think most of the readership here is aware that neither Apple nor Google/Samsung invented the multitouch screen. Those go back to 1982 at the University of Toronto. Engineering prototypes for multitouch phones outside of Apple before the iPhone. What Apple did was bring it to market first. Really, the article is cajoling us to think everyone else is hanging their identity on this stuff, and then giving it the shallow treatment and missing key history. At this point... this isn't worth our eyes.

    • Worse still is the fact that Pogue made most of his loot by Missing Manual books that veritably fawned over All Things Apple.

      Take his review with a big grain of salt. This is a fanboi, not a polished researcher, numerous tomes to his name aside.

      Yes, Apple had great innovations, there's no denying that. Jobs won by doggedly cutting away all of the cruft that his own products had, and those of others, into a minimalist functional package that did the job. Then he built genuine customer support, where the telc

      • The bias you refer to is pretty clear in the summary logic. Why make a big point of trying to split samsung vs google innovations? Because Apple has fewer. It is fair to lump them together because Android is an open platform and having lots of separate entities building on that open platform results in more innovation. Apple closes their platform and therefore loses this innovation benefit. You should not merely be comparing samsung and google innovations either, for a fair comparison you need to compile al

    • What Apple did was bring it to market first.

      ... after everybody else had written the idea off and left it on a shelf since 1982. Engineering prototypes are useless if you don't deem them worthy of being turned into production prototypes and manufactured in series and instead just drop them in a drawer to collect dust.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Nope, Palm OS used it already. Jobs copied it but made it even simpler without a stylus for a minimalist approach.

        • And that made all the difference. Back when the iPhone came out, there were already quite a few smartphones on the market, with stylus-based touchscreens. Apple's phone made it easy to quickly check the news, your mail, the train schedule... and if you saw someone take out a phone, poke at it for a few seconds, then put it away again, 10 to 1 it was an iPhone.
          • Nope, you have been deceived by the Apple propaganda machine. Good capacitive touchscreens, made by others, made it "easy" on the iphone. I hate that people ignore all the research that went into making capacitive touchscreens work, and just give Apple all the kudos for being the first to market with a product that used them. The simple fact is that much of the way people interact with a capacitive screen (pinch, momentum) just doesn't work well on a resistive screen, despite known examples of people tr

    • What Apple did was bring it to market first

      Yes, that is what innovation is, as opposed to invention. And that's what the article calls it even if they use the word invention a few times.

      • The first phone with an on-screen keyboard [youtu.be] was the LG Prada (introduced a few months before the iPhone). In fact it was the first capacitive touchscreen phone [wikipedia.org], not the iPhone as widely believed.
      • Here's pinch to zoom in 1988 [youtube.com].
      • Android had whole device search before Apple. But Apple was first to file for, and got the patent (Google apparently didn't think the idea was patentable). Google removed it from Android when Apple began using the patent to sue.
      • Digital cameras had an orientation sensor to detect if

  • First vs Improved Implementation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Friday September 14, 2018 @11:37AM (#57314090) Homepage Journal

    Being the first to innovate can be great, being the first to get it right is often better (of course 'better' is a matter of opinion). Examples:

          - Yahoo and Altavista were before Google with search engines, but Google got the better implementation and the rest are history
          - Creative was before Apple with an MP3 player, but the iPod got the better formula
          - Palm and Microsoft were before Apple with smart phones, but Apple changed the market when it brought out the first iPhone
          - Microsoft was before Apple with the tablet, but the iPad also changed the market and made them appealing

    Being first mover is great if you can keep enough of a lead, but sometimes second mover has the advantage of learning the lessons of the first mover without having to invest the same initial amount to get market validation.

    As a a buyer of technology, seeing your favourite company bring out something new is cool, but seeing them making it feel natural and not a fight is even better.

    • As a a buyer of technology, seeing your favourite company bring out something new is cool, but seeing them making it feel natural and not a fight is even better.

      I ttally undrstand what yu man.

      Pstd frm my 2016 MacBk Pr.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Microsoft beat the Apple Newton to market? With which product?

      • Exactly. Better yet, Palm got their start developing software for Newton. While we're at it, wasn't Office first developed on the Mac because Windows was crap or non-existent at the time? Screw it, can't we just get along and enjoy all this great technology rather than have a pissing contest about who-did-what-first?

        • Actually, Palm got their start writing software for the Zoomer devices running PEN/GEOS, which was a competitor of the Newton. And I'm not sure what Office has to do with this discussion, but Word was first available for Xenix and DOS. Excel was first on the Mac, although Microsoft already had Multiplan for CP/M and DOS so it actually makes sense to develop it on the platform where they didn't already have a spreadsheet. PowerPoint was bought from another company.

          You are right that Windows was pretty much n

    • - Creative was before Apple with an MP3 player, but the iPod got the better formula

      There were a lot of MP3 players before the iPod, but they were either flash based (storage is limited and expensive) or bulky, like the Creative Nomad or the Archos 6000 (which I had).

  • Why does it matter? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Friday September 14, 2018 @11:46AM (#57314138)

    As long as a phone as the features you want, what difference does it make which phone had them first, or how they ended up on your phone?

    People who care about this kind of stuff...I mean...honestly. It's just the technonerd version of "My dad can beat up your dad."

    • You are absolutely correct. It doesn't matter in the slightest. It's just the new version of Mac vs. Windows.

      For some reason that nobody can rationally explain, people feel the need to make themselves feel better about their platform choice by evangelizing theirs, and diminishing the others. This ultimately results in "fanboys" and "haters"

      It's tribalism run amok, where no tribe actually exists. Just buy a phone you like and use the fucker. Nobody should care why you chose what you did, except you.

    • As long as a phone as the features you want, what difference does it make which phone had them first, or how they ended up on your phone?

      People who care about this kind of stuff...I mean...honestly. It's just the technonerd version of "My dad can beat up your dad."

      I think the point of TFS was simply that people DO care about this stuff. The funny part is that usually those people are as wrong as the website linked in TFS about who did what first.

  • Cadillac had the first electric starter and ignition. Thomas Jefferson invented the dumbwaiter and iron plow. And, of course, Apple gets negative points for the Newton.

  • Vice versa? (Score:3)

    by Black.Shuck ( 704538 ) on Friday September 14, 2018 @11:53AM (#57314200)

    "An iPhone person might feel personally affronted when a Samsung Galaxy gets a great review, and vice versa..."

    Samsung Galaxy devices get personally affronted when iPhone users give them good reviews?

  • Innovations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Friday September 14, 2018 @11:57AM (#57314230)

    List of impressive smartphone innovations:

    - Skyrocketing prices for marginal incremental improvement
    - Devices costing $500-$1000 dollars lacking user replaceable batteries
    - Removal of widely used physical interfaces for self-enrichment / courage
    - Artificially low amounts of internal persistent storage completely out of whack with current technology coupled with refusal to provide SD expansion
    - Crummy battery life
    - Phones so thin they snap like graham crackers in your pockets
    - Lack of usability / physical buttons
    - eSIMs
    - Locked bootloaders, operating systems and carriers
    - Preloaded to the hilt with malware

    Keep up the good work.

    • /thread

      (because I lack mod points, otherwise you'd have them all)

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You forgot to mention the difficulty to extract your OWN DATA via bluetooth (an open standard), or via USB cables. You are forced to use another Apple product to extract those things you've created like Contact List, Photos, Videos, Calendar etc. While in Android world, you can do anything you want with YOUR OWN DATA without any restrictions.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • List of impressive smartphone innovations:

      - Artificially low amounts of internal persistent storage completely out of whack with current technology coupled with refusal to provide SD expansion

      That one's only an apple thing. They're thinking "different" all right.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

        List of impressive smartphone innovations:

        - Artificially low amounts of internal persistent storage completely out of whack with current technology coupled with refusal to provide SD expansion

        That one's only an apple thing. They're thinking "different" all right.

        512GB. Low? You have to trade external SD for waterproof, but I guess that ruins this rant.

    • I think you mean "lacking easy user replaceable batteries". I've replaced many batteries in iphones. I just replace the battery in my daughter's iphone 5 last night.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )
      I had a number of thoughts, and decided to just do a straight comparison:

      List of impressive smartphone innovations:

      - Skyrocketing prices for marginal incremental improvement

      In lock step with Samsung's Galaxy and Note releases.

      - Devices costing $500-$1000 dollars lacking user replaceable batteries

      And the Samsung Galaxy 8/9 [ifixit.com] are any better? At least I don't need to nuke or otherwise heat my iPhone to replace the battery.

      - Removal of widely used physical interfaces for self-enrichment / courage

      I don't know about self-enrichment, but I can agree it's annoying. It does save on space and thickness.

      - Artificially low amounts of internal persistent storage completely out of whack with current technology coupled with refusal to provide SD expansion

      However, refusing to provide SD expansion allows for waterproofing.

      - Crummy battery life

      Just a touch less than Samsung's without the flaming pocket problem.

      - Phones so thin they snap like graham crackers in your pockets

      I guess if they thickene

  • Hang their identities... (Score:3)

    by The Original CDR ( 5453236 ) on Friday September 14, 2018 @12:00PM (#57314244)
    People who get hung up on what phone they are carrying are usually people who are least likely to afford an iPhone. I know several people working minimum wage jobs in Silicon Valley who are ordering the iPhone XS MAX 512GB for $350 down and $46 per month. They would be better off financially by buying a pre-owned iPhone 7 outright for $288.
    • They're buying status. To people who have status, it seems ludicrous. It's like how well-off people think working class values are bizarre and alien. When you have a meal, who cares if you get enough to be full? What matters is the presentation!

    • People who get hung up on what phone they are carrying are usually people who are least likely to afford an iPhone. I know several people working minimum wage jobs in Silicon Valley who are ordering the iPhone XS MAX 512GB for $350 down and $46 per month. They would be better off financially by buying a pre-owned iPhone 7 outright for $288.

      You'd be better off not admitting you know them in the future ;).

    • They would be better off financially by buying a pre-owned iPhone 7 outright for $288.

      And even better off buying a brand new Android phone at half that price.

  • "Innovation" is too strong a word for many of these features. "Market testing" may be a better word: who market-tested them in practice first. For example, "slow motion" existed on analog cameras and projectors before electronic computers even existed. (And on dedicated digital cameras.) Implementing it in a smart-phone may be a lot of detail-oriented programming to get the necessary processing efficiency, but it doesn't take a breakthrough: any competent programmer with sufficient time can implement it.

    The

  • Not in vain are they made by companies on fire.

  • After watching the poor build quanlity on apple mac books I wouldn't go near an iphone
    https://www.youtube.com/user/r... [youtube.com]
    A lot of the apple stuff comes across more as "look at me I have an apple"

  • Phone wars are just stupid, mmmkay?
    The smartphone in general is a pretty remarkable technological marvel. Let the lawyers split hairs over who did what first.

  • An iPhone person might feel personally affronted when a Samsung Galaxy gets a great review, and vice versa

    Come on. NO ONE feels like this in reality. At worse you might get trolls in the comments for good reviews of one or the other, but it real life an iPhone user gives exactly 0 fucks about a good review for any Android phone, and vice-versa.

    Now you might get annoyed by a review that gets wrong something about a phone you actually use, that just makes sense.

  • Bah (Score:2)

    by jimbo ( 1370 )

    It's irrelevant who invented something first and whether somebody copied something or figured out something independently, unless a law is broken. Given that it takes a year to create a new phone the first on the market with something might not even be the first to start developing on it - like the notch which were developed simultaneously by two companies even though one put it on the market first.

    It's like the "Opera did this 10 year ago, Firefox" thing; it doesn't matter. Whether they reinvented, were un

  • Conceptually, this beat them both by about 7 years.

    https://www.zdnet.com/product/handspring-visorphone/

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      WTH's with that picture? It just appears to be the backside or maybe a charging cradle. Ignoring the low quality, it doesn't even show the front of the device [google.com].

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SeaFox ( 739806 )

        Okay, I figured it out now, it's a picture of just the visorphone portion with its cord attached -- which is really worthless with it being mostly out of frame with no context.

    • Conceptually, this beat them both by about 7 years.

      https://www.zdnet.com/product/handspring-visorphone/

      Never spoil a good slashdot story with actual facts.

  • Bullshit article (Score:3)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Friday September 14, 2018 @01:17PM (#57314724) Homepage

    The entire article is bullshit. It is assuming absolute stock OS with absolutely nothing installed on it, if my assumption is correct from some of these dates I'm reading. Google didn't want to entire step on the toes of all of their vendors and carriers which were implementing a ton of these features long before they were standardized and pushed upstream into the main Android OS. For instance, they list Android as getting "Voicemail Transcription" only this year. I can't remember ever having a phone WITHOUT this feature in the past 5+ years now. Google Voice has supported this feature I believe since day 1. Carriers such as T-Mobile have had "Visual Voicemail" as part of their package for several years too.

    They also have an entire section on keyboard features. This is the same issue all over again. Android for a very long time has supported custom keyboards, and I don't think I've ever seen a non-Nexus/Pixel phone use the stock keyboard. All of those additional features have been available for quite some time before they say they became available. On top of this, other features are not mentioned. Things like swype keyboard support are entire absent from this article as to give the appearance that Apple has the more innovative feature set. Yeah, its easy to pick them as the winner when you purposefully ignore things Android did years before Apple.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by darkain ( 749283 )

      "Google's Assistant came much later" - completely ignoring Google Now + Google Voice Search (which were merged and rebranded as "Assistant", but that doesn't count, because new name, therefor it didn't exist before)

  • It is imortant to remember A-Og developed Hammer before S-Og!

    A-Og Obsidan hammer superior to S-Og Basalt hammer because it shiny!

    Don't drop A-Og hammer or it will shatter!

  • (...) Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it. (...)

    No they didn't. They did something else entirely, but it's so invisible that apparently nobody thinks of it. We had touchscreen smartphones well before the iPhone came out. And if you leave out the phone, we already had a comparable feature set back in 2000 with devices like the Sony Clie. None of that was revolutionary. What WAS revolutionary about the iPhone was the introduction of App Store (with the iPhone 3G). That's what made the iPhone the success it is and created the ecosystem needed to sustain it.

    • (...) Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it. (...)

      No they didn't. They did something else entirely, but it's so invisible that apparently nobody thinks of it. We had touchscreen smartphones well before the iPhone came out. And if you leave out the phone, we already had a comparable feature set back in 2000 with devices like the Sony Clie. None of that was revolutionary. What WAS revolutionary about the iPhone was the introduction of App Store (with the iPhone 3G). That's what made the iPhone the success it is and created the ecosystem needed to sustain it. They also introduced the iPhone at exactly the right time w.r.t. the state of battery, touchscreen and networking technology and Internet penetration. So if you're going to give credit to Apple for their inventions (which they deserve - don't get me wrong), let's do it for the right reasons: The App Store and perfect timing. The rest is just high-quality copy-catting.

      Cool story, except the iphone was already successful before that. If you remember back when iphone happened (or ipod for that matter) it was basically about fashion/status. There were portable mp3 players before the ipod (many were better) but you were a loser if you didn't have an ipod. There were smartphones with touchscreens before the iphone but you were a loser if you didn't have an iphone. The fact that Apple stuff was more expensive than competitors was a selling point. Just as high prices are a

  • >"Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it."

    "As we know it?"

    That is quite a disclaimer. Palm and others had very functional touch screens for a long time before Apple had any phone at all. Of course, they were resistive and not capacitive. But I read all the time in the media how Apple invented the smart phone, which is absolutely and totally false. And how Apple invented the touchscreen phone, which is equally false.

    But since Apple tried for years to say that large screen phones are stupid

  • I keep seeing things listed after such and such date, but then confused....because well, I had such Samsung phones with such earlier.

    a) I think this guy did not do diligence in his research.
    b) Simply counting Samsung and Google and ignoring ALL other androids is ludicrous. Keep it Android vs iOS.

    ******

    Also not included: Features that existed before the smartphone era, like downloadable ringtones. They weren’t Apple’s, Samsung’s, or Google’s ideas in the first place.

    My Palm IIIe Palm

  • They showed the market that ordinary folks would spend a $1,000 for a phone. The iPhone was $500 after the subsidy from a 2 year contract.

    2006 - Blackberry 8700, $299 with contract

    2006 - BlackBerry Pearl $199 with contract.

    2006 - Palm Treo 680 $199 with contract

    2006 - HTC's Pocket PC phones were around $250-$350 with contract, and they usually dropped significantly in price after 6 months

    You see, Apple's biggest innovation was proving that consumers would pay the $500+ for a phone. It wasn't that other com

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