Mic Wright on his trip to Korea to meet Samsung in 2007:
We were told early in the trip that mentioning Cupertino, Steve Jobs or the iPhone was a no-no. So, showing the due deference you can expect from the British press, we asked every executive wheeled out to lecture us what they thought about the iPhone and how Samsung intended to counter it.
I love that the Brits enjoy causing shit.
It’s a memo that Samsung didn’t want admitted into the trial, and until now had kept it out. But this morning, when Samsung legal counsel John Quinn mentioned the “crisis of design” moment in a question to Samsung strategist Justin Denison, all bets were off, and the memo was in.“Influential figures outside the company come across the iPhone, and they point out that ‘Samsung is dozing off.’ All this time we’ve been paying all our attention to Nokia, and concentrated our efforts on things like Folder, Bar, Slide,” Shin wrote. “Yet when our UX is compared to the unexpected competitor Apple’s iPhone, the difference is truly that of Heaven and Earth. It’s a crisis of design.”
Oopsie.
[Via DF]
Acer CEO JT Wang:
“We have said think it over. Think twice,” Wang is quoted as saying. “It will create a huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction. It is not something you are good at so please think twice.”
There’s trouble in them there hills.
Google’s Matt Cutts on the myths and realities of enabling two-factor authentication.
How can there ever be any doubt about how much Samsung rips off its competition.
Device malfunction was cited nearly three times more than a desire to exchange for one of Apple’s tablets, according to a study conducted by Samsung at Best Buy Stores in 2011.
That must make Samsung feel better.
Be sure to scroll down and watch the video of Sarah’s run. Such a beautiful animal.
Eastman Kodak, which is planning to auction 1,100 digital patents, received two bids from investor groups including Apple Inc and Google Inc of between $150 million and $250 million, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Samsung wants consumers to buy its Galaxy S III so badly that it’s willing to pay them for their old smartphones.
Priceless.
I bet Samsung stole the forks and knives from the lunch room too.
Apple said in a statement on Monday that its license to include the YouTube app in the iOS operating system “has ended.” Apple noted that “customers can use YouTube in the Safari browser and Google is working on a new YouTube app to be on the app store.”
Seems odd for Apple to issues a statement for an operating system that’s in beta and under NDA.
NPR:
His father told him he’d never amount to anything but a ditch digger, a remark he still carries with him years later.“I was sort of studying sex, drugs and rock and roll in high school,” says Steltzner. It wasn’t just the long hair. “I liked to wear this strange Air Force jump suit. And my first car was a ’69 Cadillac hearse. I put a bed in the back.”
Great story.
A no-nonsense look at managing email from Matt Gemmell.
Classic.
Federal prosecutors on Monday announced a deal to drop a criminal case against Gibson Guitar Corp. after the instrument maker acknowledged its importations of exotic wood violated environmental laws.
iCloud documents are cached on your local machine so that you can open them even if you don’t have Internet access. The files can be accessed in the Finder in addition to the Apple application dialog boxes.
Great tip.
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David Christopher, for AT&T’s Consumer Blog:
Our new AT&T Mobile Share plans will be available starting Thursday, Aug. 23.As families prepare to send students back to school, many are looking for a convenient way to connect tablets and laptops or add new smartphones. AT&T Mobile Share plans are a great option.
Whether they’re “a great option” depends entirely on your current plan and how much data you’re using on your devices. But for some families, the plan may make more sense than paying for individual data plans for each phone. A “Mobile Share Planner” tool AT&T has put on the Web site may make it easier for you to figure that out.
Mike Williams for Gamesindustry.biz:
Electronic Arts has filed a lawsuit against Zynga for infringing on copyrights related to The Sims Social. In EA’s complaint filed today in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, the publisher has accused Zynga’s The Ville of standing as willful copyright infringement. The Sims Social launched in August of 2011, while The Ville launched in June of 2012.
I admit that I haven’t play either, but my wife was an avid Sims Social player until The Ville launched. She switched because she says that The Ville is less crash-prone than Sims Social.
Samsung is pulling out all the stops to protect itself from Apple’s lawsuit, but so far everything they’ve done seems like more of a distraction from the truth — they copied Apple’s iPhone.
One of the interesting things that I’ve noticed is that Samsung hasn’t actually come out and denied copying Apple, instead their tactic seems to be to say that Apple copied the design from Sony. Of course, as John Gruber noted this argument has already been discredited.
Here’s the thing, though — it’s not a Sony phone. It’s an in-house mockup by an Apple designer inspired by a very broad description of Sony devices. There is no actual circa 2006 Sony phone that looks like this.
Exactly right. The so-called “Jony” phone was a concept phone that Apple built. It was conceived and designed by Apple.
When that argument failed, Samsung moved to the F700 and tried to show that Samsung had the design first. Not even Android-focused Web sites bought that story.
Cory Gunther from Android Community:
This picture above says the F700 was shown at CeBit 2006, and then released in 2007, making Apple and the iPhone the one that copied them. This is completely false.
Samsung fans that have contacted me on Twitter and email have used the same argument that Samsung seems to be using now — you can’t patent a rectangle. That is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.
Using that argument doesn’t do justice to the billions of dollars in research and development that Apple has spent over the last decade to make the iPhone.
Apple has done more than patent a rectangle. They developed and perfected a new way to interact with a personal computing device that fits in your hand. They called it the iPhone.
Apple didn’t spend all of that time and money developing the iPhone so Samsung could just copy it and release products that looked the same. No matter how you look at it, copying Apple’s iPhone design is not right. That’s exactly what Samsung did.
The cell phone and nascent smartphone industry hadn’t changed in years when Apple showed the iPhone in 2007. If developing a new way of doing things was so easy, why didn’t Samsung do it earlier? Why did they wait until after Apple showed the iPhone to develop their phones?
The answer is simple — because they copied Apple.
Samsung would have you believe that they have designers that develop products themselves. These products, Samsung would argue, have not been copied from Apple, even though Apple released the product first.
Let’s look at the Galaxy Tab. Again, a Samsung product released after Apple’s iPad, but one Samsung says wasn’t copied.
It’s interesting then that not even Samsung’s lawyers could identify the Galaxy Tab when placed next to an iPad by the judge.
Katie Marsal for AppleInsider:
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh this week held both a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and iPad above her head, and asked Kathleen Sullivan, a lawyer representing Samsung, to identify what company made which. According to Reuters, she could not do it from a distance of about 10 feet.
Perhaps lawyers don’t know about design. I suppose you could make that argument if you were desperate. How about consumers — surely they know what they’re buying, right?
According to Best Buy, “Samsung tablets were being returned because customers thought they were getting iPads.”
And that is Samsung’s strategy. Watch what Apple is doing, copy that design as closely as possible in hopes of confusing the consumer and then sell millions of devices. It’s illegal and makes you a scumbag, but they thought they could get away with it.
Phil Schiller addressed this during his testimony last week:
“[Copying] creates a huge problem in marketing on many levels. We market our product as the hero and how distinctive it is, how consistent we’ve kept it over time,” said Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, as he was questioned by Apple lawyer Harold McElhinny. “Now when someone comes up with a product that copies that design and copies that marketing, then customers can get confused on whose product is whose…. If you steal [the way the iPhone looks] you’re stealing all the value we’ve created.”
I think Apple’s Scott Forstall summed up the company’s feelings about Samsung:
Asked if he told anyone at Apple to copy Samsung’s designs, Forstall replied, “I never directed anyone to go and copy something from Samsung. We wanted to build something great. There was no reason to look at anything they had done.”
Of all the people that contacted me, of all the arguments Samsung made, the one thing nobody said is that they didn’t copy Apple. That just seems to be a given. The argument is whether stealing from Apple is legal or not.
It’s impossible to argue that this lawsuit is about rectangles. Samsung ripped off Apple’s design because it wanted to confuse consumers and they thought they could get away with it. Samsung’s designed changed remarkably in 2007, after the iPhone was introduced.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s theft.
Great shots of Mission Control when Mars Curiosity Rover landed.
This is an incredible experiment.
Reuters:
The full moon rises through the Olympic Rings hanging beneath Tower Bridge during the London 2012 Olympic Games.
As a photographer, you dream about getting perfect shots like these.
A few days ago I asked my Twitter peeps for recommendations for a Railroad Tycoon-type game for iOS. There are quite a few railroad-themed games for iOS, but I was looking for the modern day equivalent of the classic Sid Meier strategy game (first published when dinosaurs roamed the earth by Microprose).
One game floated to the top pretty quickly: Railroad Story from Alawar Games. (It’s available as Railroad Story HD for iPad for $1.99, or regular for iPhone/iPod touch for a buck. “Free” versions are also available.) I’ve seen it advertised on Web sites, and when I looked at the screens, I thought it might have the elements I’m looking for, but on further inspection, I have to say it’s come up short. On its own merits, it’s a good game, but it wasn’t what I had hoped for.
Railroad Story puts you in the role of an enterprising railroad magnate trying to build his empire during the industrial revolution, across the expanding United States. The game features a series of missions in which you connect towns and cities by rail, then manage the traffic on the rails, effecting repairs, and making changes to routes where you need to. You have a specific budget to start with, and an end goal to win each mission (deliver a certain number of railroad cars to a location, make a certain amount of money).
Railroad Story uses an isometric (three-quarters) view and is fun to use to lay out tracks – you can build tunnels through mountains, bridges over bodies of water, and have to work around obstacles. Track layout is pretty straightforward, but you can’t lay tracks diagonally (just at 90 degree angles), and you can install switches and stops if you want to adjust the flow of traffic more effectively.
Each town has a station where the trains depart, each carrying mail, freight or passengers, occasionally one will be marked as an express. You collect money depending on the cargo and the quantity. You have a specific time limit for when the train needs to arrive at its destination; if you fail, you lose money.
In addition to track repairs (which cost you income), you’ll also have to spend money to clean up accidents (if you occasionally send two trains at each other on the same track, there’s no way to reverse one), and every so often one town or another will pop up with a civil disturbance, plague or famine you have to fix by sending “special” trains their way before you can restore the flow of commerce. New towns will appear over time, as well, requiring you to modify your track layouts to accommodate them. Sometimes this can require quite a bit of adjustment because of the limits of track geometry.
Railroad Story comes with 15 missions and three “bonus” missions that you can play sequentially in Campaign mode, then return to later as you want, but that’s it – there’s no sandbox mode that lets you play indefinitely, and little of the depth I was hoping for. By the second or third mission you’ve mastered the basic gameplay mechanics; all that’s left is timing, smart track layout and hitting your goals. Some of the missions are quite challenging.
Alawar also earns dings for lousy proofreader jobs in this essay: there are numerous misspellings and awkward grammatical constructions that mark this as a product from people who don’t speak English natively (Alawar is a Russian developer). I also ran into an occasional problem getting the game to recognize input; returning to the home screen and restarting the game invariably fixed it.
In short, Railroad Story is a time management game with fun and challenging moments, but it’s not Railroad Tycoon. I’m not dinging it for that, I just want to make it clear to other gamers who were hoping for something similar. But if you’re fond of trains and trying to play beat the clock, it will keep you quite busy until you run out of missions to play.
Mat Honan:
I know how it was done now. Confirmed with both the hacker and Apple. It wasn’t password related. They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass security questions.
The good news is the hacker didn’t brute-force the password. The bad news… yeah.
Mat Honan:
At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. My password was a 7 digit alphanumeric that I didn’t use elsewhere. When I set it up, years and years ago, that seemed pretty secure at the time. But it’s not. Especially given that I’ve been using it for, well, years and years. My guess is they used brute force to get the password (see update) and then reset it to do the damage to my devices.
I’ve known Mat for a lot of years and he’s a really smart guy. This should be a lesson to all of us.
Two of the best.
Very nice and free for personal and commercial use.
Asked if he told anyone at Apple to copy Samsung’s designs, Forstall replied, “I never directed anyone to go and copy something from Samsung. We wanted to build something great. There was no reason to look at anything they had done.”
HA!
Eric Slivka at Mac Rumors has a number of links from yesterday’s testimony at the Samsung trial that indicate Steve Jobs was receptive to the idea of Apple making a 7-inch iPad.