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Comment by spiralpolitik | Hacker News Reader

It's also interesting that images on the poster are front on so that feature details such as sliding keyboards and flip keypads are usefully omitted. With names like Slider and Flipper it almost gives the game away.

It's not just the boxes either. See the cabling and power adaptor.

http://cydiahelp.com/samsung-copies-apple/

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I can excuse most of those, but the big exception is the USB plug. A proprietary USB cable is an anti-feature from the consumer's point-of-view. Copying that is like copying Apple's typos.

Samsung clearly wants to interoperate with iPhone/Pod/Pad enabled docking devices by using the same usb/docking port. Accusing them for using it is like accusing laptop manufacturers for using mini-displayport.

The plug is actually not the same as the Apple plug. That plug is Apple proprietary so Samsung would have to pay Apple some serious cash if they used it. They just developed their own lookalike cable.

Then there is no point in it. What the hell Samsung?

It's almost as if when the iPhone launched the designs started to heavily converge on whatever Apple was doing, though prior to that there are some surprising similarities.

This whole trial has been enormously educational. Stuff like this rarely sees the light of day.

> It's almost as if when the iPhone launched the designs started to heavily converge on whatever Apple was doing

Absolutely. And now they're diverging again. But it took courts to force that shift.

Its a poster designed for PR purposes, of course it is designed to convey certain facts and hide others. A couple of other things I noticed:

- the 'before' shows more in the iphone-like category and less in the other category of phones than the 'after'. Also the iphone-like cateogy has heaps of phones compared to other categories. This plays with your sense of weighting and importance because automatically you assume that you can compare numbers of phones on this chart, which you can't (mostly because iphone-like pre-iphone devices are all prototypes, whilst others are just a fraction of produced phones.)

- many of the 'before' phones in the iphone-like category are '2006', probably after Samsung would have known what apple is producing.

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