Samsung internal document evaluating the iPhone (translated) | Hacker News Reader

Samsung internal document evaluating the iPhone (translated)

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"We study every car in order to discover if it has features that might be developed and adapted. If any one has anything better than we have we want to know it, and for that reason we buy one of every new car that comes out. Usually the car is used for a while, put through a road test, taken apart, and studied as to how and of what everything is made. Scattered about Dearborn there is probably one of nearly every make of car on earth. Every little while when we buy a new car it gets into the newspapers and somebody remarks that Ford doesn't use the Ford. Last year we ordered a big Lanchester--which is supposed to be the best car in England. It lay in our Long Island factory for several months and then I decided to drive it to Detroit. There were several of us and we had a little caravan--the Lanchester, a Packard, and a Ford or two. I happened to be riding in the Lanchester passing through a New York town and when the reporters came up they wanted to know right away why I was not riding in a Ford.

"Well, you see, it is this way," I answered. "I am on a vacation now; I am in no hurry, we do not care much when we get home. That is the reason I am not in the Ford."

You know, we also have a line of "Ford stories"!"

-- Henry Ford, My Life and Work (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7213)

Reminds me when I was at a car factory that manufactured Ford, Mazda and Mitsubishi cars for Africa. They had a model of a car from a different manufacturer at their office. I won't forget the sight of all the doors and hood being open while a number of people were inspecting the inside and outside of the car.

I don't think there is anything wrong with this documentation. I am sure Samsung has hundreds of other documents for other devices.

A good company looks at the competition and takes apart what they are doing right and wrong. Its what the company I work for does. We own a copy every competitors software. When a new version comes out we look at each change to see if there is anything we can learn and if we need to react to it. I am sure competitors do similar things with our products.

Its how you react to this study which defines you I guess. We don't just clone features. If we need to react to a feature we will probably put in something similar but it will be our take on it so it fits with our design and UI principles.

Contrast this to Samsung. This document does look like a lot like. "On the right is what we have now. On the left is how it should work." This is probably why they are being sued.

I'm sure they've made similar comparisons, just look at the Samsung phones that preceded the iPhone. But if they have hundreds of other documents, I assume they would try to get them admitted into court in order to marginalize this document. And failing that, that they would leak it to the press in order to win popular support.

I was kind of hoping that this document would also address some weaknesses in iOS an propose solutions for Samsung to innovate ahead of Apple, but if they had such an analysis, it's not in this document.

Still, this really is a goldmine of stuff. I particularly like the bits about the keyboard, which Samsung clearly styled to be nearly visually identical to the iPhone's keyboard, yet misses so many subtleties.

Also, from slide 105 (p110): The iPhone's camera (3G?) actually takes 3 times as long to start as the camera on the S1, but Apple makes it feel faster by showing a shutter animation. Perceived speed is so important and Apple is a master of illusions.

Wow. This document illustrates exactly why design and attention to detail matters. In absolutely every comparison the iPhone just makes sense and works and the S1 has some kind of clumsiness. Very impressive, Apple.

What would be the point of an internal memo which only highlights areas where your company is doing better than the competition? Particularly when the competition is making a lot more money?

SWOT analysis exists to cover all areas, even Samsung must have heard of it and copied that as a methodology. Perhaps no Apple weaknesses were highlighted because there were none that Samsung could find.

Almost every "Directions for improvement" statement could be replaced with "Do it how the iPhone does it" and still basically be saying the same thing.

Some example "Directions for improvement" statements:

* Phone: Need to modify the call end button on the call screen so that it is a separate large button

* Calendar: The date displayed on the Calendar icon should match the current date on the phone

* Calendar: Need to modify by enlarging the area displaying daily schedule and the font size in order to address the low visibility

* PC Program: Need to [make some kind of change], like iTunes

Picturing myself as a Samsung engineer having finished reading that document, I could quite easily think "they just want us to copy the iPhone as closely as possible" even though the wording in the document itself doesn't explicitly say "copy the iPhone".

As a Samsung engineer I would think "they want us to stop making crap and learn from the iPhone". These are all cases where the iPhone basically does it the Right Way.

For every issue they explain why the iPhone does it well and the S1 not. To me it doesn't read like they want to copy the iPhone, but rather like they want to make it right (by copying the iPhone). Important distinction. This is consistent with their last direction for improvement: "Remove a feeling that iPhone's menu icons are copied by differentiating design".

The intuitiveness is why Apple makes great products. That takes time and money to do right. Everything looks obvious and simple in hindsight. This really makes me question my stance on software patents.

Then it must also make you question your stance on recipe patents, fashion patents, and screenplay patents.

Thanks to the iPhone, Apple has become the largest publicly traded company in the world and stashed 100 billion dollars in the bank.

They did this without winning a big trial against Samsung, HTC or Google. I don't think Apple needs to win this or another patent trial to have the incentives to build top quality products. On the contrary, letting them secure a monopoly on all these good ideas might diminish the incentive for innovation. They already have ridiculous profit margins[1], which if anything indicates a lack of competition.

[1] over 50% gross margins: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/26/us-apple-margins-i...

After all it would be so nice if Microsoft patented kernel low level algorithms and we would not be able to run these cheap Linux servers in the US.

Or if IBM patented them first in which case MS and Apple would not even exists, long live software patents.

Sorry for the sarcasm.

I would suggest we are not even talking about software patents but design and dress patents. I dont really think you can compare low level kernel algorithms to a visual design and dress patents. So to me thats an unfair comparison. In fact according to to other documents Ive seen, these are all dress patents being argued over.

Usability is technology. In every case in the document, it's, we got it wrong, the iphone got it right, let's fix it. Not, let's copy the look and feel of the iphone, it's purely a usability comparison not a style comparison.

In other words, you dont know what a design patent or a dress patent is. gotcha...

A note of caution, this is a translated document. I have no experience with Korean but in Mandarin and Japanese a LOT of subtleties are lost when translated.

That said, you're probably right and it probably is a pretty accurate representation of how bluntly they wanted to grok the iPhone.

Of course the iPhone gets it right in every comparison, since the purpose of the document is to list cases where the iPhone is better and the S1 should be improved. Still very impressed by the difference in polish though.

No! The document shows the areas where Samsung believes there to be room for improvement. This document does not mean that "in absolutely every comparison" the iPhone finishes first.

Some of the examples are so poorly executed (on Samsung's side) that I can't think of any possible explanation for them beyond pure laziness. For example:

   1. Landscape mode is only supported in Memo and Calculator when rotating
      left, not when rotating right. 
   6. The buttons are cut off when the keyboard is visible.
  11. Pressing NEXT changes the font to lowercase. Huh?
  27. Long telephone numbers get cut off (instead of shrinking the font size
      to fit).
  36. Alarm settings buttons are cut off by the number pad.

None of these examples are particularly difficult to get right, as long as you have someone paying attention to basic UI design. What's amazing to me is that they actually shipped a product with these glaringly obvious deficiencies.

The first one was just not implemented in Android at that point, it didn't work for any app. The second and last are also part of how Android works (/worked, not sure if it has been changed), because it's supposed to work on different screen sizes.

Of course it would have been possible for Samsung to implement those in Android, but I'm just pointing out it would be more work than just changing some values in the app. At the time of the S1 Android just hadn't matured yet.

Double wow. This is a March 2010 document and the iPhone has already got copy and paste (was that iOS 3 or 4?). That means Samsung and Android had already been playing catch up for several years to get to this stage, this wasn't a comparison of their first prototype.

It is also disappointing that Samsung wasn't pointing out the iPhone and challenging their designers to do even better rather than trying to match Apple. Although maybe that happened later for the S2 and S3 development programmes.

Also without a good example to follow (although there were plenty of bad ones which probably all had some good parts) it is impressive how much Apple got right from the very beginning.

Based on Wikipedia, Android got copy and past marginally before iOS (April 2009 vs June 2009)

From my personal experience Android copy and paste is more reliable than iOS - I get quite a few web pages on iOS where I can't mark text to copy, turning JS often gets around this

I wasn't claiming copy and paste was first on Apple (or even best) but I recall that it wasn't there to start with which made me go back and check the date on this document. I had originally assumed it was a much earlier document and the Samsung interface being benchmarked was an internal prototype of a first generation Android but it seems it was an actual product and probably not the first (although I don't have mobile phone model histories in my head).

I am an Android fan but Samsung simply doesn't "get" UI design and user experience. Sometimes even the most basic things.

Good thing Google seems to have improved their sense of UX/UI since ICS, I love my Galaxy Nexus with Jelly Bean

Are Samsung and others still screwing up the vanilla Android UI with things which are worse?

IMO, Samsung has come a long way in smartphone market just because it copied or got inspired from one and only Apple. Few years back it was one among Nokia,RIM,HTC. Now, it has transformed/evolved itself Technologically and Aesthetically (see the power and design of S3)by looking at apple (i would say getting indirectly groomed by apple) and now as analyst Neil Shah puts it "Volumes have polarized around only these two brands".(http://mashable.com/2012/07/27/samsung-surpasses-iphone-ship...) So,it is time to pay back at least part of its profit share to Apple. And then, from now continue on its own innovations instead of Ctrl-C &Ctrl-V from Apple.

yup, and basically Apple just did Copy/Paste/Polish from others, who in turn did Copy/Paste/Polish from others. And so on, and so on, back to the inventor of the portable phone. Now let's all pay him back.

It's one thing to look at what's come before and synthesize and improve on it. This OS "creativity". The idea that all everyone does is copy and paste is ridiculous and disingenuous.

Hey, I like any document containing "Plaintiff's exhibit" and "Highly confidential - Attorney's Eyes Only" made publicly available on the Internet ;)

I haven't been able to follow discussions of this case closely, but from the samples that I have seen, the dominant narrative seems to be that the similarities between Samsung's devices and those of Apple are like the similarities between the Great White Shark and the Orca: of course they're sleek & hydrodynamic, of course they have dorsal fins, of course they have sharp, pointy teeth — they are filling similar niches, and given enough time evolution can make sea-dwelling, top-predator mammal look like a sea-dwelling, top-predator fish.

But now it looks like the designers of the orca have been studying the shark in excruciating detail.

If these design elements of touch-screen phones are so obvious and natural, then why do deep, point-by-point comparisons like this?

I get advertisements for the S3 inbetween pages. Nice touch.

Does anyone have a link to the straight up PDF version?

It's easier for me to read the text that way & I think it's sorta evil Scribd wants me to log in (or give access to my Facebook account?) before I can download.

This should be transformed into a book on good VS bad UI practices

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