You may have thought, with the San Jose court ruling, Samsung has to pay Apple in excess of a billion dollars for infringing on its patents and keeping it cool for copying its ideas – at least for a bit. The video of Samsung’s new Sydney retail store made us all chuckle a couple of days ago for its almost inch-by-inch emulation of an Apple retail store, and now, it looks as though the Korean outfit is after snippets of Apple’s desktop operating system.
Having remained objective throughout the court hearings, it appears as though the blogosphere has their pitchforks out for Samsung, and judging by the company’s latest move, it isn’t too surprising, either. Competition within a market is one thing, and if one company innovates, it only makes sense for others to try something similar, but it just so happens Samsung is being very blatant about it.
As well as the plagiarized mobile designs and copycat stores, it has now been revealed that the “S Launcher,” which will appear on all of the company’s Windows 8 machines, looks uncannily like the OS X dock. As Android users well know, Samsung likes to its own proprietary software on top of what’s offered as standard, and although many of them have proved rather useful – S Voice, for example – we have a feeling this implementation might be more trouble than it’s worth.
Take a look, and we’ll let you be the judges:
Given the bare-faced manner in which Samsung Australia’s VP of telecom – Tyler McGee – maintained the company’s Apple Store lookalike was made without any interior design tips from Cook and Co., it’s hard to ascertain whether Samsung is simply agitated at Apple’s steadfast lawsuit behavior, or genuinely doesn’t see its products as looking and functioning so similarly to the Cupertino company’s.
Whatever the case may be, Samsung ought to have learned from what’s happened over the past couple of months, and adding an OS X-esque dock into Windows 8 is not the way to move forward.
The dock is patented to Apple, and having seen how readily it will drag Samsung through the courts, we’d have to pit the S Launcher as one of the least smart moves in recent tech history.
(via Gizmodo) (source Mashable)
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