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Samsung claims 7-day tablet turnaround

A Sydney court has heard today that if Justice Annabelle Bennett allowed Samsung to release its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet onto the market, it would take the Korean-based manufacturer a mere week to manufacture devices and put them on Australian shelves.
Written by Luke Hopewell, Contributor

A Sydney court has heard today that if Justice Annabelle Bennett allowed Samsung to release its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet onto the market, it would take the Korean-based manufacturer a mere week to manufacture devices and put them on Australian shelves.

The comments came as part of a cross-examination in the court today of Samsung Australia's head of Telecommunications, Tyler McGee.

McGee told the court that while he isn't an engineer, he expects no more than a seven-day gap between manufacturing the devices in Samsung's factories to having them on shelves, provided that no changes need to be made.

"That's the time it takes from producing it in a factory to get it to the marketplace," he said.

However, when asked by Apple's legal counsel how long it would take the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to get to market if Bennett asked Samsung to remove offending features, McGee was at a loss.

Any timeframe for feature removal, he said, is based purely on speculation.

"I'm not an engineer, I can't tell you how long it would take for a software engineer to remove [the offending] features," he said, as Apple's legal counsel quizzed him.

In an amusing twist, Samsung's legal representative also informed the court at one stage, when questioned about the Galaxy Tab 10.1's proposed advertising campaign, that Samsung would not require anywhere near as extensive a marketing campaign given the publicity it had received because of the patent infringement case.

Apple hauled Samsung before the New South Wales branch of the Federal Court last month, claiming that the US version of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 infringed on its patents, including "slide to unlock" and the "edge-bump" feature. Its end game is to curtail the release of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Australia.

Samsung revealed in a later hearing that it would be countersuing Apple in Australia for patent infringement in Apple's iPhone and iPad product lines.

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