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Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

Steve Jobs: Android a 'stolen product'

By | October 20, 2011, 6:17pm PDT

Summary: Steve Jobs said he would go “thermonuclear” on Android, an operating system he saw as a “stolen product.”

Steve Jobs felt that Android was a rip-off of Apple’s iOS and wasn’t going to settle any lawsuits with Google or its partners no matter what.

As details emerge from Walter Isaacson biography on Jobs—the Apple co-founder’s decision to put off cancer surgery—his hatred of Android may be overlooked. Isaacson’s bio launches on Monday and he will detail some of the book Sunday on 60 Minutes. The Jobs biography is published by Simon & Shuster, a unit of CBS, owner of ZDNet.

The Associated Press details Jobs’ view of Android and his relationship with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt was on Apple’s board, but resigned after Android was launched. Jobs felt betrayed. According to AP Jobs said:

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

It’s worth noting that Apple has more than twice the cash hoard since that Jobs quote. Meanwhile, there are no signs that Apple will back off its Android lawsuits.

Jobs made it clear he wouldn’t settle for any amount of money. AP’s Michael Liedtke tweeted some choice Android excerpts.

The comments shed light on Apple’s series of lawsuits against HTC, Samsung and others over Android. The big question is whether these lawsuits will be settled under Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Related:

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Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

Disclosure

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

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Hardly.
guyonearth 19th Mar
Hardly. Apple thinks everything that has an operating system and a touch screen is stolen.
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Well, duuuh! It was!
@Cylon Centurion Google "Stole" a Java-based fully threaded operating system from Apple that created an Objective-C based single-task vaguely macintosh based system?

Heck, if you want to go postal about "stealing" have a look at the pull-down notification screen that's been on Android for a couple years, and then compare to what Apple just rolled out on iOS 5. You DO hate "stealing" right? Or will you just stick with technologically ignorant selective outrage?
@spark555: anyone can go to YouTube and look at what original Android UI was. Of course, nothing like iPhone.
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RE: Steve Jobs: Android a 'stolen product'
Pete "athynz" Athens 21st Oct
@spark555 The pull down notification screen was - on the iPhone OS - originally a jailbreak tweak to the OS and Apple hired the creator of that tweak to develop the notification system used in iOS 5.
@Pete "athynz" Athens: "The pull down notification screen was - on the iPhone OS - originally a jailbreak tweak to the OS and Apple hired the creator of that tweak to develop the notification system used in iOS 5."

.. and? It was still a tweak to make iOS notifications more like the successful Android model, rather than brain-dead interrupt-your-game modal dialogs. Apparently "stealing" UI ideas only flows one way for Apple.
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RE: Steve Jobs: Android a 'stolen product'
Pete "athynz" Athens 21st Oct
@psdie I never claimed that the guy who made the jailbreak tweak was not inspired by the Android notification system - I was pointing out the chain of events for clarification.
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@spark555 Still waiting for any sign of outrage from team "stealing UI design is evil" about iOS 5's blatantly obvious copying of the Android pull down notification design.

If you people really believe copying UI design is so horrible, why the massive silence as Apple does it, contrasted with endless claims that Android is "stolen" because it comes in a rectangular package and has icons on some screens?
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@DeRSSS Yep. And _anyone_ can look at iOS 5's new notification pull down to see it's obviously similar to what Android created.

Now the hard part: Is Apple evil for "stealing" this aspect of Android UI, or will only get upset when anyone _except_ Apple does it?
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you have read my mind
QatQat 24th Oct
@spark555 I could not agree more. Comparing an OS that in 2011 hasn't got any desktop but just a scrolling menu with a list of applications with one that, supporting pre-emptive multi-tasking can have desktops and guess what ...even widgets on them, well you really need to be an iFanatic to do that. If you believe that the latter stole from the former then you must be brainwashed by Apple's aggressive marketing.
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RE: Steve Jobs: Android a 'stolen product'
burn0050 Updated - 24th Oct
What really irks me is that the Mac interface was stolen from Xerox. So, Steve Jobs, and his revolutionary interface was not his own idea. Apple was very good at improving and perfecting ideas. But is anything they've done truly original? You can see the iPad in Star Trek: TNG. Sure, it wasn't a real product, but the idea was there - a touch screen, connected tablet.


And speaking of - multi touch was not an Apple invention either, even though they seek to defend it as such. It was first shown at TED in 2006, and soon after Microsoft released the smart table. Just google jeff han ted.


While I have respect for Steve Jobs, his double standards always annoyed me, that he could accuse others so easily of stealing, but never admit that shortcoming in himself.
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@spark555 good point, you know that Apple was kicking themselves for not thinking of that... I use that pull down menu 100 times a day, and I find iPhones clunky because they don't have that OR any useful buttons. Sometimes people just want a frickin button.
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@burn0050 "What really irks me is that the Mac interface was stolen from Xerox".

Boy, that story never gets old. Do a little research. Yes Xerox came up with the mouse, point and click and such. But the original Mac interface is *very* different from that of the Altos. Just google it.

Lets put it this way: after all these years, every desktop in use today is still closer to the original Mac than the Mac was to the Altos.

Not to mention what Xerox plans were for their technological breakthrough: Zerox.
@Cylon Centurion

Yes, it was ... his last dying breath.
@Cylon Centurion
I think Jobs was actually raging against HTC "stealing" the iPhone's "look and feel". At least, that's what the link suggests to me. It wouldn't have been the first time Apple had sued another company for such a thing, either. I remember Windows 95... wink
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@Zogg Look and feel? Heck, my Sony Clie and Palm III and Palm Pilot before that had a screen with icons in a row. You tapped on them to start a program. The iPhone looks suspiciously like that did. So did Apple steal that or is a rectangular screen with tappable icons just a common sense interface?
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RE: Steve Jobs: Android a 'stolen product'
gadgetlover Updated - 21st Oct
@boomchuck1

When Jobs held up the first iPhone at MacWorld, I thought for a minute he was holding up a Sony Clie TH-55 released in 2004, 3 years before the iPhone - Tablet form, 3.5 inch screen, 480 X 320 screen, minimal buttons on front, and sporting rows of icons for its interface with an option for a more graphical interface. Using Apple's SOP, Sony should have sued Apple for ripping off the form, and feel of the Clie Th-55 three years later.
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@boomchuck1 exactly. Do not forget the HP palm organizer. Mine had Wi-Fi, icons, rectangular.
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@boomchuck1

And before that, a small obscure British company produced an icon driven multitasking touch driven OS called EPOC. That company was Psion! The year was 1997. After that there was really not much origionality, just functionality.
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@Cylon Centurion

Well that's a laugh, where did Apple come from ?

Courtesy of Xerox !
@Alan Smithie: ... William Gates of Microsoft did not pay anything, just stole concept ideas and that was it).
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@Alan Smithie

I was wondering when someone was going to bring up Xerox. Apple was FOUNDED on stolen ideas from Xerox...kinda like the Pot/Kettle, seems to me.
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@Alan Smithie
Good that brought up one of the originals..... The GUI was not "stolen" when he visited the research facility of Xerox, including his "invention" of pointing device mouse. People would be surprised but I have read the reverse allegations from one of the core teams of Microsoft (who had already left the company long ago) about Apple stealing/robbing left and right ideas from Microsoft. And the same person and company believes that a rectangular drawing shall give them the copyright of never before in the world a rectangular was drawn.
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@Alan Smithie

Don't you know it wink

???Good artists copy, great artists steal??? he continues, ???We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.??? I believe Jobs borrowed this from Picasso?

Hard to take Jobs seriously on this when he's being completely hypocritical.
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@Alan Smithie & gandalas.

Learn your history, or at least look it up on Wikipedia.

Apple was founded by Jobs and Wozniak to market the Apple I as a kit computer. They decided to do the Apple ][ as a finished product, the first personal computer to be sold that way. Nothing there was taken from Xerox.

As for the "courtesy of Xerox" part, of course when Jobs saw the STAR computer he had to have it. So he licensed the technology from Xerox and hired the engineers who had worked on the computer. Xerox could have owned the market, but did not know what they had until too late.
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@Alan Smithie
"Apple was FOUNDED on stolen ideas from Xerox...kinda like the Pot/Kettle, seems to me. "

Actually Apple wasn't founded on ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as much as Macintosh and the original Mac OS was. Apple was king in the computer industry then, with the Apple II line of products supplying all the funding for the Mac and Lisa lines. And while the Mac OS was being developed, Jobs had nothing good to say about the Apple II products.
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@ssaha Licensed from Xerox? Really? Is that how you want to put it? Apple might have done what was legal enough to copy what he saw at Xerox, but he did copy it. The BIG issue is that Jobs didn't come up with the concept of the GUI and the pointing device. Those two things changed the UI protocol. It was a watershed moment that Xerox deserved all the credit for.

If it wasn't for Xerox, there would have never been a Macintosh.
@Alan Smithie ... Apple didn't "steal" the GUI from Xerox: Xerox invited Jobs and engineers in to see it, then licensed the concepts for the GUI and mouse to Apple. That's not stealing. That's a business deal, the way it was supposed to be done. That's why we have patents.

But Google's Schmidt was on Apple's board and saw the iPhone concepts long before anything was public and he used that information to change product plans back at Google -- something he had no right to do. As an Apple board member, Schmidt should have excused his himself from any involvement with Apple's phone plans, given that Google had plans for a phone product, as well.

Instead, he used his position to gather secret intelligence that he then put to use back at Google HQ.

Schmidt's position on Apple's board enabled Schmidt to change course before the iPhone was even out, so that it could more quickly get an iPhone-ish Android version to market -- much more quickly than it could have had it had to wait (like everyone else) for the iPhone's into before he saw what the iPhone was like.

Had Schmidt bought Apple stock based on what he knew, that would have been considered insider trading and would be illegal. Clearly, Jobs felt Schmidt's actions were unethical, and I think anyone who thinks about it rationally would reach much the same conclusion: Schmidt definitely had a conflict of interest and apparently lacked the moral standards to do the right thing.

Of course, that's basically all water under the bridge now. But it certainly puts Apple's Android-related lawsuits into perspective.
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RE: Steve Jobs: Android a 'stolen product'
PolymorphicNinja Updated - 21st Oct
@jscott69
Actually, that's not true. No licensing occurred at all. Xerox had a sizable investment in Apple, and part of the investment agreement was that Jobs could get a tour of their facility. If anything, it's history repeating itself except it's Schmidt as Jobs and Apple as Xerox.

I appreciate Jobs's focus and ambition for this semi-ridiculous crusade. But, spending every bit of Apple's money to kill Android? Seems like an awfully irrational thing to say.

One just need to Google "Good artists copy great artist steal steve job" to see a rather famous quote from Steve Jobs himself on this very subject of "stolen product".
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@gandalas Not quite... Apple was founded on parts stolen from HP happy. The whole "stolen from Xerox" thing happened later.

And, as both common sense and the courts have said, over and over again, you can't steal an idea. Or rather, you can take an idea and do anything you like with it. Ideas are not intellectual property, and only property can be stolen.

The main reason the mobile world is really fun and interesting now, the reason it wasn't before the iPhone, and the reason the desktop is boring and might be getting stupid right now is all about stealing. Stealing good ideas is good for everyone. I claim that Android was as much inspired by Palm and WinME as Apple, but even so, anything they saw in the iPhone and put in Android (haven't noticed all that much myself), good for Google. Apple's certainly playing the turnabout is fairplay (sic) game, with all this "stealing" from Android in iOS 5: lack of PC dependency, pervasive web sync, usable notifications, etc. In fact, you kind of wonder if the iOS team didn't all switch to Galaxys S or Droids... one day, maybe even full multitasking! Just remember -- they stole it from Android. Or AmigaOS. Or UNIX. Or...
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@Alan Smithie A little perspective here on any possible influence by Schmidt. He was on the Apple board for four months and a week-and-a-half before the iPhone was introduced. That's hardly enough time to complete major changes in the OS.

Fact is, the "all screen" PDA or MP3 player or smartphone was already a meme gaining traction. Rumors about an Apple device had been circulating for over a year. In fact, your detective work is faulty here...

Years before, in 2005, Palm introduced the Palm T|X, a nearly "all-screen" device. In fact, the screen was EXACTLY like the original Apple iPhone screen... clearly, while they changed the touchscreen to capacitive (like the touchwheel in every iPod after the first), they "stole" the 480x360 color screen idea directly from Palm. No keyboard, no fixed digitizer like on early palms, just four buttons and a 4-way toggle thingy in-between 'em, compact and below the screen.

And what-do-you-know, Google bought Android in August of 2005... just a few months before the all-screen Palm T|X shipped. Everyone knows Schmidt was a Palm user, no doubt he traded up his aging Palm V for the new T|X (I mean, I did it -- that's the one that finally got me upgraded, so it stands to reason ... hmmm... I think Schmidt was stealing my upgrade idea here). And ... what do you know... almost exactly three years later, the G1 is introduced... with four buttons and 4-way toggle thingy in-between 'em, compact and below the screen. The PalmOS had rows of little square icons to load programs, Android has little square icons to load programs.

Yup, that's where they got the idea. Apple, too, it would seem, given that the iPhone, too, was heavily influenced by the Palm... even to the extent that, unlike Android but like PalmOS, those icons are always on-screen except when you're running an app. At least with Android, they can go away.
@Cylon Centurion

LOL, what a surprise to find a gazillion posts on this subject.

At any rate, here are my two cents: Jobs is at laest partly right. The Android OS and android phones were clearly designed in response to iOS, and offer a similar experience. I doubt any code was actually stolen, but Android is an attempt to create a competitor to iOS that offers much the same experience.

But ultimately consumers will benefit enormously from the existence of competing operating systems, and a world in which consumers could only choose between iOS and, say, Blackberry would result in higher prices and less innovation.

Remember, the whole point of intellectual property law is to protect innovators, but only in the interests of promoting the public good. A patent is a government enforced monopoly and is granted in the intrerest of furthering the public good. Therefore, patent law must weigh the benefit to Apple of a robust and broad patent protections vs. the benefit to the public of a looser standard.

With this in mind, it would be unacceptable for the courts to drive the Android OS from the market. A scenario I'd rather see is one in which Apple makes money by licensing certain IP to Android phone manufacturers... something like that which Microsoft is currently doing (though in my opinion with much less justification).
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RE: Steve Jobs: Android a 'stolen product'
mangal_tripathi@... 21st Oct
@dsf3g - In sync with you....Look at the way Android gained market share to 45%. Its people's OS and thats what Google is promoting.........thanks for sharing your wonderful insights...:)
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@dsf3g Bingo!
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@dsf3g Agreed,
And furthermore, I'm at a loss to figure out what is so revolutionary about iOS or Android for that matter. It's essentially a computer desktop system configured for a tiny screen. The most remarkable UI component (and UI is what Apple has been really sensitive about)is pinch to zoom. Everything else to me seems pretty standard. Apple deserves a ton of credit for getting that platform going (though Blackberry might really be more deserving depending on your point of view) but I don't see how anything Android did qualifies as theft.
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The Android system does nobody any good. Almost all of my friends running Android are going to switch to iPhones because of the daily reboots required for Android based phones. Competition is great for the market and utlimately I see that there will be three smartphone operating systems in the same ways that we see three operating systems for computers. Linux/Android for those UNIX purist that will not want to run anything better, the iOS and MacOSX, and Windows. There are those that will choose to run Windows over everything else because it just works and the same reason for MacOSX and iOS. Android is like Linux, a complete pain in the rear and totally fragmented, and thusly will end up going to a small marketshare once everyone realizes just how painful the Android experience is. If the statement is true that the UI is based in Java it is no wonder why the experience is as painful as it it.
@Cylon Centurion
...was stolen from them!
@kd5auq
Actually, it is like Mercedes Benz claiming the steering wheel, which it did in fact invent...
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@Cylon Centurion
Well, Steve might have thought that but probably have forgotten the time he and Woz visited Xerox.
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@toomuchtime

Woz never visited the Xerox PARC Labs. He was the main engineer behind the original Apple and Apple II. He was busy keeping the Apple II line going with Jobs criticizing every Apple II product. Keep in mind that the Apple II sales kept the Mac development going, but Jobs still had nothing good to say about the Apple II line. At that time Jobs had already set up a Macintosh unit within Apple and was working toward the first Mac OS.
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@Cylon Centurion ask Steve Wosniak who stole what from who ???

Then take some time to learn about the internals of iOS and Android and you will see they are very different making this claim nonsense !
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EXACTLY and why it is so funny how Mr Android says SIRI is dumb for a phone. The dude created NOTHING, everything android does was copied from Apple. So when they are forced to copy SIRI too then what? some day netflix will work on all android platforms eh....
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@bspurloc of course the speech recognition was invented by Apple in iOS...
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@Cylon Centurion It was? you were there? Please don't make comments without proof.
@Cylon Centurion ...Your talking rubbish my friend..
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Android is no more a stolen product than the Mac was from Xerox...
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@Cylon Centurion - theft is not the issue. What we see is a perfect example of why IPR payments should be limited to "juste retour". Apple made enough from IOS to repay the cost of developing it and enough extra rent to provide lots of incentive to develop the next big (well, pretty) thing. Pay them too much, and they'll start investing in perpetuating their monopoly power.
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Steve Jobs, Megalomaniac
JimboNobody 21st Oct
And that was after he became a Buddhist. Not disputing that he was brilliant, creative, successful. But that doesn't make everything else acceptable. Or it shouldn't, anyway.
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@Cylon Centurion
It's easy to see why he felt this way. Some of us are old enough to remember when Windows was released, and it seemed certain that Microsoft would lose in court over it's obvious copy of Mac's OS.
There was never any question that they had copied the overall jest of the OS and only made a few minor changes to it. I believe even Gates was surprised he won that battle!

Then along comes Android, some twenty years later, with history repeating itself once again. The only difference this time is Apple is in a similar financial situation to where Microsoft was... our corrupt system often means that money talks louder than justice.
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@camcost@... sorry Windows was never a copy of the Mac UI and that is why it won in court, prior art showed that PARC created the interface and IBM actually licensed it for OS/2 which was being created in collaboration with Microsoft. When they disagreed on how the OS was going to go forward when creating OS/3, Microsoft took its work and created Windows. The original Windows was just an overlay to DOS and not until Windows 95 and using the NT kernel did Windows actually start showing its potential. While OS/2 was a powerful OS it suffered from IBM's lack of confidence in the consumer market so was stifled, if it had been allowed to progress with Microsoft, it would probably be the predominant desktop OS today.

As far a patent trials go they just make the court system look like it can be bought, judges are free to allow and disallow whatever information they want, Microsoft enters the courtroom guilty until proven innocent, Apple is allowed to doctor evidence and it stands, judges decide to exclude prior art even though that is the test that is supposed to be used. Apple touts pinch and squeeze on the iPhone, yet Microsoft demonstrated the same thing three years previous on their interactive table, the iPad is not new, Microsoft demonstrated one in the 90's and so did Apple, a lot of what is being cited as new is as old as the hills, Palm demonstrated gestures in the 90's, why are companies being given new patents. Google, Apple and Microsoft are not stealing from each other, just have to read the speeches Bill Gates gave in the 80's on the future of computing, he described smartphones, tablet computers and mp3 players, Steve Jobs before he became a megalomaniac also gave such speeches, I will say this about Steve he was perhaps the finest snake oil salesman the world has ever seen. Everybody arguing that Android is a ripoff of iOS, wrong they are both a ripoff of Blackberry and Palm, Apple just repackaged it and made it consumer friendly, Google did the same just making open source. Everybody is jumping to the conclusion that the licensing deals Microsoft is doing has to be software yet they are only dealing with hardware companies and you can't discount Apple here because they have a technology cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft so even the iPhone is infringing on a Microsoft patent.
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@Cylon Centurion

If you haven't noticed MS is making about $5.00 off each Android phone sold so that means Google stole from MS too! I tip my hat to Mr. Jobs for shaking things up but I don't buy much into the you stole this from that and so on. With each product there will be an improvement to it. If a company like Apple is slow to make changes and someone beats them to it then bravo!
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Hardly.
guyonearth 19th Mar
Hardly. Apple thinks everything that has an operating system and a touch screen is stolen.

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