Relative Evaluation Report on S1, iPhone (2010) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Relative Evaluation Report on S1, iPhone (2010) [pdf]

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67 pointsradeeyate60 comments

Going through those screenshots show just how stark the UI (not to mention UX) between iOS and Android was (is?). While I wouldn't relish going back to early iOS it still looks clean and polished vs the Android UI in the picture which is all sharp corners and UI that has no consistency or through-line.

Early Android UI was such a clusterfuck. Not surprising really given that it started as a BlackBerry-like UI then pivoted hard when the iPhone was launched. They also weren’t really in the position to finely curate their app collection so just about any shoddy UI got approved for the store.

And then Google dedicated an entire version (3) to tablets only, leaving phones with a rapidly aging v2 UI for far longer than they should have.

There are a bunch of alternate histories from that era, if MS had their shit together and launched the Windows Phone a little earlier I think it could have taken the place Android occupies today. Android really wasn’t impressive in the early days (and I say this as someone who bought a Nexus One day one)

Early Android was so bad it was impossible to believe that anyone had tried to use it before release. The first bug I filed against the Nexus S was that the camera app recorded video frames out of order. If literally anyone had tried the video function even once it would have been obvious. Total failure of dogfood testing.

> Early Android UI was such a clusterfuck. Not surprising really given that it started as a BlackBerry-like UI then pivoted hard when the iPhone was launched.

Don't forget all the early Android phones that launched with physical controls to navigate around the screen, like the trackball on the HTC Dream or the directional pad on the Motorola Droid. It's as if they weren't quite sure touchscreen interfaces were going to take off, so they wanted to hedge their bets.

To be fair to early Android UI, this isn't regular Android UI. This is TouchWiz. Especially these early versions of TouchWiz, it was a huge mess of a UI. Almost all of the apps shown here weren't the stock Android apps, they were Samsung's versions. While early Android wasn't particularly great or well-polished, TouchWiz was even more of a mess.

To compare, look at page 7 "Basic Function _ Call"

And then also look at how the "Call" app/feature looked like in stock Android 1.0: https://youtu.be/av73uZIsgx8?si=PXL01b-tfGUPoimD&t=34

Very different from the TouchWiz version, and personally I like it more than the iOS version.

Here's a side by side comparison between iOS 2 and Android 1.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkC2GQCFv94

But I believe the Samsung S1 launched with Android 2.1 (Eclair)[1] and it got an official upgrade to Android 2.3 Gingerbread. I found this comparison video between stock android 2.3 and TouchWiz: https://youtu.be/iNaECPgyDss?si=xp_TaDXgsGPk36I1&t=72 It's not exact because you can already see the TouchWiz UI is a bit upgraded from what's in the PDF but it's close and you can see the evolution of android stock UI as well from the 1.0

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_(2010_smartph...

When I worked at a Nokia company, in 2014, someone sent me a copy of the board presentation on how the iPhone would fail and was not of any concern to Nokia's market dominance. Basically something someone had put together briefly after Apple presented their first phone.

The hybris displayed in that deck was as flabbergasting as it was hilarious. Not even in retrospect. It was all about how Nokia had better screen resolution, battery lifetime, CPU speed.

That the Apple UX was absolutely novel and superior was not considered at all.

the screenshots from Samsung look like a high school project compared to the iPhone ones. Granted, Samsung is in a much better place now compared to back then.

I feel like they're in a worse spot because of how many Android competitors they have now. Back in 2010, they were the main 'alternative' to an iPhone, it was basically a duopoly for a few years - Apple vs. Samsung. Now there's the Google Pixel and a million Chinese phone makers so that Samsung doesn't stand out too much. They seem to be leveraging connections with carriers to push Samsung phones, which seems to keep them afloat.

I don't recall which year it was, but at least one year back in that general time frame when the financial reports came out, Apple and Samsung together had taken over 100% of the revenue share in the smartphone market: that is, they were making profit (and Apple was making the lion's share), and every single other company in the sector was taking a loss.

The opposite is true. There are many fewer android OEM's now, at least in the US. LG, Sony, Motorola, HTC, etc all quit or were bought out.

Is it? On the other side of the equation, there are tons of new Chinese Android OEMs: Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and friends, ZTE, Lenovo, Haier, Hisense. AFAIK all of these except ZTE and Huawei sell in the US, often under different brands.

FWIW I've never actually seen anyone using any of these except ZTE (I'm in northeastern US).

They do tend to sell under different names - Lenovo sells as Motorola, and Oppo sells as OnePlus. Before the ban, I'd also see a few Huaweis, also in the northeast. In Canada, Huawei used to be fairly common and TCL is still carried by many carriers as a budget option.

A faster mirror: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2024/436142-samsung-relat...

Apple v. Samsung Evidence: 'Relative Evaluation Report on S1, iPhone' [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353762 - Aug 2012 (2 comments)

It felt like it took a long time for the old guard to swing around to a touch-first interface after spending a decade or so building interfaces meant to be navigated with arrow keys below the screen.

The first iPhone was Apple's first attempt at a modern touch screen device too. I think the difference is mainly in the extreme amount of care for details Apple seems to have for everything user related.

Sure—but Apple had the advantage of being able to develop the whole thing fully to their satisfaction before revealing it (jury-rigged initial demo notwithstanding).

Once the iPhone was revealed, everyone else had to scramble to catch up in real time, and many of them tried to just half-ass it—or, as the GP says, just weren't used to the paradigm and took a while to figure out how to do it well.

For most other companies, the shift to / focus on touch interfaces was reactive. Apple’s first (mass market) mover advantage allowed them much more time for extensive internal iteration. Remember, they started off with the iPad, err, Newton…at least.

I had the first Android phone, the HTC Dream, and it still had a flip out keyboard and a mini trackball for navigation. I know the attitude among many Android early adopters was that going full touch-screen was bad thing and should be avoided. Apple was right in the end though.

Early touch screens (capacitive?) were also not great. I remember iPhone's being pretty decent, although I don't think I had one until the 3, but my memory is a bit fuzzy from that far back! They could be frustrating to use, and often the usable area for interactivity was smaller than the actual screen, with issues detecting touch at the edges.

This seems perfectly reasonable / common to do.

A few days ago I made a similar list.

What I find funny about this document is how obvious it is that Samsung's prime directive, at the time, was to do whatever Apple was doing. Even when that didn't make sense for Samsung to do, like suggesting that they add streaming radio functionality to their synchronization application because iTunes had that feature (page 80).

Every company should do this. In fact many do.

This is called competitor analysis and is the fastest way to motivate employees and start improving things

Every company does do it. I'd like to see Apple's 2010 version for comparison. Something like:

1. Samsung has copy and paste

More introspection is needed to get this right. Apple has copy and paste. And they even had a sort of decent text selection at some point (iOS 16?), so their list surely still thinks that this capability is fully functional.

Not sure what you mean, iPhone 1 didn't have it because "[Ken Kocienda] didn’t have time to do it right."

https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1538536958258909184

Once it was added (2 phones later) it was such a big deal they had an ad for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKjESdHPGB0

I misread the comment to which I was replying. Oops.

I don't want to be pedantic, but in fact point 13 in these slides says the opposite: Safari has copy&paste and the Samsung browser has not.

That's the interesting difference: While Android may have been "first" to copy&paste, Apple would not have released the feature in a state where it does not work system wide.

> Apple would not have released the feature in a state where it does not work system wide

This is false. They released it in Safari in iOS 1, in a state where it did not work system-wide (across iOS).

No one used Samsung Browser, they just downloaded Chrome :) (which had it in 2009/Android Cupcake).

No. copy&paste was released with iPhone OS 3.0 system wide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_OS_3)

I agree—to repeat: the feature did not work system-wide on release; only in Safari (iOS 1 being 2008).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_OS_3

Copy and paste did not exist at all on the iPhone in 2008 - not even in Safari.

[https://www.wired.com/2008/09/iphone-22-safar/] [https://x.com/kocienda/status/1538536958258909184]

Also it just looks like fun Engineering. You get to tear apart a whole machine down to every last nut screw and bolt. Then itemize it and approximate the cost to produce.

It's very neat I got to see some of this process during a tour of an auto engineering facility.

Where's the rest of the document?

Honestly, now that I've seen this, I'm a little bit mad that I've never seen one of these for products I've worked on myself. I'd argue this presentation should be mandatory reading for product people everywhere.

... and they didn't leak the 200 ways in which S1 was better than iPhone.

By the way, where is Apple's flip-phone?

Yeah, I mean that was the time where Android had a notification tray and iPhone didn't right? Perhaps they have such a document at apple and that's where their tray came from? Was copy/paste possible on the S1? I guess so right? Took a while on iOS.

Anyway, props for Samsung for making such a document internally.

No props at all. It’s a completely normal product development artefact. Par for the course, and expected. The other document you hypothesise is called Samsung understanding their USP. Not everything is about some silly 2000s OS holy war. Behind all these tribalist fights are teams of people just…rocking up and building things. This is just how it’s done.

This wasn't a leak, it was filed as part of the Apple v. Samsung trial

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