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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

This actually looks like good competitive analysis more than anything, IMHO. In some sense I expect most companies to do something similar. I'd hope that Ford walks through Toyota, BMW, Honda cars with a fine tooth comb understanding all of design trade-offs and places where they can improve.

I want companies to be comfortable looking at and improving over their competitors, rather than being in constant fear of being sued.

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Without the bottom directives, I'd agree it's good competitive analysis, especially if similar documents exist for multiple vendors' phones.

But the bottom directives turn it into a PRD (requirements doc), and the directives themselves call for steps that make the devices much more similar.

Excellent point - Samsung looked at the iPhone design as the definitive source, rather than deconstructing use cases or consumer needs.

Even the icons and color themes are the same on many screens. That by itself shows that Samsung copied Apple in prior product reviews as well. Kinda funny that they still had so many design discrepancies...

Yes, that's a good way to put it. And a "good" competitive analysis would also analyze Apple's weaknesses, and seek to exploit them. (e.g. turn-by-turn nav, google mail integration, better multitasking, whatever)

Not if your product is lagging so clearly on ridiculously basic stuff that you get a far better ROI on just fixing the glaringly obvious deficiencies you have compared to the market leader.

Sometimes the competition does it just right and you have to make it "more similar". Many times in this case.

Sometimes the competition does it better but not necessarily the only right way, for example the email indicator on slide 20. In that case the directive suggests another way of improving the interface.

Whoever wrote this document did not want the devices to be too similar:

Strong impression that iPhone's icon concept was copied. Directions for improvement: Remove a feeling that iPhone's menu icons are copied by differentiating design. (last slide)

Wish they did that before putting the phone on the market...

If I understand correctly, this is a report - for me, it's natural that it would include product recommendations as well as criticism. Whether the company follows up on those recommendations or not, is an orthogonal issue.

But in this case for feature after feature the reason it makes the devices much more similar was that at that stage the iPhone UI decisions made obvious sense. There's a lot of stuff along the order of "we've tucked stuff off in the border somewhere in a color that blends in, but we need to make it bright and put it in a noticeable position" where the iPhone was a good example of UI done right but where the same overall direction could be had by looking at any number of other products (and not just phones either).

I've not read the whole thing, but I've not seen any clear examples where they've had lots of choice in how to make things better without making things more similar to the iPhone. Now that's an impressive testament to the quality of Apple's UI design, but most of it is "obvious" - the problem isn't that it's hard to figure out that you'd like a "previous" button to go with a "next" button, but that it takes a lot of attention to detail to get this level of consistent quality throughout the product.

And Apple does that well, and Samsung at that stage clearly had not done all that great.

If Samsung had put in that attention to detail, the devices would likely have been a lot more similar from the outset.

This is the thing I hate about HN guys: when it comes to the discussing Samsung vs. Apple nearly all members seem to close there eyes plus minds and just say "I don't see what Apple is talking about. I don't see any attempt to copy or something which got copied".

Did you even see the document? The document clearly shows that they compared nearly every feature and what needs to be done to improve their feature to work like the competition. This is like when BMW would analyze a Mercedes and say "We need to exactly work and look like a BMW. Let's have a look what we need to do to work and look like a BMW".

This document isn't about the defacto standard. This is not about how users are working with their phones and what can be improved to get a better experience with a Samsung product. This is not about analyzing how you do against a strong competitor.

This is just: Let's copy the strongest competitor on the market and we are good to go. And this exact thing is a shame and it is even a bigger shame that no one wants to admit that there is something fishy going on here!

Just stop fucking copying and start developing own good products.

They already did: the Galaxy S3.

And the sad thing is: it worked. They even broke sales records with it. And it seems that not even one of the biggest brands can stop one of the biggest copycat.

If I had a startup and would work on a great product and some company would just copy my ideas and would break records? I would go crazy.

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