“Samsung has announced a new metal-edged flagship smartphone that takes its design language a step closer to the iPhone — and gives it something to fend off competition from surefooted Android startup Xiaomi,” Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch. “The latter has been gobbling Samsung’s lunch in China and just last month announced its own iPhone-a-like flagship, the metal-edged Mi 4. Bottom line: What Xiaomi can copy, Samsung can copy, too.”
“Question is whether Apple will fire up its lawyers for another design infringement court battle, given that the last one resulted in a near $1 billion bill for Samsung,” Lomas reports. “The new 4G Samsung handset is called the Galaxy Alpha, and on the specs front packs a generous but not crazy big 4.7 inch HD Super AMOLED display.”
“Samsung’s fingerprint sensor is also on board,” Lomas reports. “There’s 32GB of internal memory and no Micro SD expansion slot — presumably that’s had to be sacrificed to make way for the seamless metal-band design… Samsung describes the new design as refined, sophisticated and compact in terms of construction. It does not say ‘iPhone-esque’ but if Steve Jobs were around to see it he’d hardly be mincing a verdict.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Without Apple’s trade dress to infringe, Samsung would be utterly lost.
Samsung can’t sell phones with their own crappy “design” – cheap plastic injection-molded by the blind – so they go back to their only successful play: Knocking off Apple’s iPhone.
Samsung’s ‘Instinct’ is obviously to make Apple iPhone knockoffs.
Apple’s products came first, then Samsung’s:
Here’s what Google’s Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
Here’s what cellphones looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
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