Will ban of Samsung Galaxy S II due to Apple lead to more Galaxy S III sales?
Summary: The Galaxy S III was released after the legal filings by Apple and appears to be safe at the moment while Apple tries to get the GSII pulled from store shelves. The GSII is still popular due to its low price and compelling experience.
The Galaxy S II is still a very popular device with the carriers due to its relatively low price and advanced Android feature set. As a result of the Apple vs Samsung judgement, Apple is attempting to get these models and more banned from US store shelves. If the GSII is pulled from stores, I wonder if this will lead to more sales of the GSIII and end up working out better for Samsung to get their new device into the hands of smartphone buyers.
I always recommend that consumers buy the best smartphone they can and stop worrying about saving $100 to $200 up front since this is a miniscule one-time fee you have to pay while you live with the selected smartphone for two full years. I just do not understand why consumers in the US think paying $50 to $100 for a worse phone is better than going all out for the best at the time of your purchase. However, we see it time and again that people would rather pay $99 for a decent device rather than $299 for an outstanding one. The GSIII sells for $199 on most carriers while the GSII is still available for $10 to $149.
The Galaxy S III comes with Ice Cream Sandwich, but even then it still functions much like the GSII. I am not sure if Apple can go after this device since it wasn't detailed in the lawsuit or if it will be the subject of another lawsuit, but if you are interested in Android then this is definitely the device to consider.
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Talkback
Different price segment
But, of course, SGS3 might get some collateral boost.
No products will be banned any time soon because Samsung will appeal...
Agreed
For some reason the high tech industry feels that they are a bit different from the rest of the world. Look at the e-book insanity. Until e-book technology, libraries have always loaned books but now since it is digital...well everyone is screaming bloody murder, no loaning of books. The high tech industry doesn't want to give up ownership of anything. It is as though they have never heard of the first sale doctrine and instead, they pay off government officials to pass digital rights laws. It is a strange mentality. The same mentality was used with the cassette tape but the $ catastrophe never happened. I ask, are the rock stars starving. I didn't think so.
The jury has already admitted that they didn't understand
You don't have to guess, we've already been told that the jury did not understand any of this and that the jury foreman decided everything.
"Look at the e-book insanity"
Interesting thing about Apple's "values" and their "love" of competition: Apple is being sued by anti-trust authorities for forming an eBook cartel that sought to have eBook prices raised by 50% and have the publishers withhold their books from companies like Amazon that wanted to sell the books for less.
Puts that whole "we care about competition and consumers" speech into context.
I agree, but I also think icon and I disapprove of software patents.
The case will likely stay alive on appeal for as long as six more years and by then even current Samsung models will be obsolete. The Galaxy II is only in demand because with its replacement by the Galaxy III it has been used in price promotion offers by service providers.
Since a price for infringement has already been set, it is unlikely the judge will remove any models from store shelves, and will instead stay his decision on removal of the models if in Apple's favor. Samsung itself might chose to recall the phones though for sale in nations growing more rapidly than the USA, since it realizes more profit on the Galaxy III.
I believe that in the end both Apple and Samsung will lose money on this case, which took weeks of lawyer preparation and weeks of trial over trivial design issues.
I side with the U. S. Patent Office which never wanted to allow software patents. All they have done is slow the pace of technological innovation and put us at a disadvantage in many world markets. As any computer programmer knows in the same computer language there are only a finite number of ways you can do any task. You don't have to outright copy computer code to produce code that to an untrained observer looks like the same code with variable names substituted.
Computer programmers make more fun of what their employers apply for patents on than anyone else. Patents are never supposed to be granted if the way of producing the product is obvious after all. For example, what would logically be used instead of a trash can to show you want to delete something. I am sure it wan't the patent office's desire to see every possible variant of types of garbage containers. Registered trademarks that it is now too late to enforce are the only way of protecting a word, made up or real and after that every occurence, including as an icon needs to have a circled R to identify the icon as owned by some company.
It's up to the government to determin if an item can be patented.
Trademarks do not have to be applied for to be legal as they just have to be used. No if challenged in court it's allways a better idea to apply for the patent, copyright or trademark.
As fas as the programming part. Yes there are many ways to get the same result in a programming language. That hold true in a higher level language but all that higher level gets translated into a lower lever only that machine understands. One of the things that always disturbed me in the Apple and Microsoft argument was when people talk about GUI. Everyone talks about the visual graphical interface when underneath the code is different because back when Apple created their GUI and MS created WIndows they were on different processors. The code is completely different yet the visual display the same. Code may also be different based on which complier your using with the same language. There are alot of gray areas in software business and patents and copyrights.
Code isn't patentable.
Agreed
"They rushed to judgement."
I have served
My personal view on this is, I will NEVER BUY anything from Apple EVER AGAIN as they are seeking to use thermonuclear war when they simply could nod, and say, look our product is really really good, look at these people knocking it off with a cheap imitation.. buy the real thing people... and have done with it, and be satisfied with the few customers they can rip off with their outrageous pricing, when the competition offers a generic version of the same thing for much less (which is what MOST PEOPLE WANT.)
"moral of the story"
Thermonuclearwar
Anyone who's ever visited Bootle knows......
Complexity, exactly.
Foreigners
It would be much harder to predict the outcome. After all, any jury is just as likely to have friends working for Google as they are to have friends working for Apple.
Instead they'll sue the 'nasty foreigners' because they know they'll win in a local court with a jury. It's basically cowardly bullying tactics.
No. There's a reason these people aren't buying S3
Cheap build and quality - Rubbish
I am now free from being tied in to any infrastructure and can purchase my books, music and films wherever sells them cheapest. I have a folder structure like in windows that makes it really easy to manage my content the way I want it. I was able to add a 32GB card for content so do not have to upload stuff to the cloud which may not always be available in some areas. I have a screen that was large enough to watch the Olympics on 3G as I found during a recent stay in hospital. On my iphone I had to maintain multiple folders (I was up to 4 games folders) whereas on android ICS I can put as many icons as I like in a folder, reducing my main screen to one page. It is lighter than the iphone, audio is clearer and the screen is also large enough to make it a viable place to read web content. It has become so useful to me that my iPad now sits on the shelf at home! If they had updated it earlier I would have gone for the Note with its even larger screen (next time maybe) - I don't see how my phone can be a copy when there are so many differences! I find it laughable that Apple were granted patents on a rectangle with rounded corners - it is such an an obvious design, and using icons - don't we have icons on windows Linux and Macs - this is just importing them to a phone - how on earth could they be granted a patent for this?
If these patents were driven by the unions then companies would be shouting about restrictive practice - why aren't these patents seen as restrictive practices - they certainly were in the British Courts where there is generally a good deal of common sense applied with law. Anything that makes companies afraid to market new phones is bad for consumers and good for App£e (new logo based on the old M$ !)
The best reply I ever read!
Like you mentioned, having rectangular design with rounded corners are simply lame. Icons is the standard GUI in lots of platforms. I really don't understand why the trial is biased towards Apple.
I Agree
second to the rubbish statement