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.
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.
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.
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".
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".
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...
Or if IBM patented them first in which case MS and Apple would not even exists, long live software patents.
Sorry for the sarcasm.
That said, you're probably right and it probably is a pretty accurate representation of how bluntly they wanted to grok the iPhone.
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.
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