Samsung smartphones: Apple copies?
There is some debate about whether or not the Samsung smart phones are copies of Apple products. Certainly Apple believes that they are and has sued Samsung claiming that twenty five of their products are actually copies. While it is certainly true that some of the Samsung products do look very similar to those of Apple it is not clear that they are copies. There are after all only so many different ways to layout a smart phone. If the claim is made based on the fact that the Samsung has a screen that takes up pretty much the whole face of the phone it would be hard to argue that this is a copy.
The other reason that there is some doubt about whether or not the Samsung smart phones are copies of the iPhone is that some of the products actually pre-date the iPhone. Apple are claiming that phones that were released as early as 2002 are copies which is a little bit hard to understand given that Apple didn't introduce a smart phone until 2007. Really one could argue that the iPhone copied Samsung, although nobody seems to making that argument.
Of course the real reason that most people don't consider Samsung smart phones to be copies is that they use an entirely different operating system. While they may have some external similarities the operating system is what really matters with a smart phone. Samsung uses the Android operating system which is used on a wide variety of smart phones and which operates in a very different way to the operating system that Apple uses. The result is that while the phones may look the same few users would mistake them.
If the smart phones produced by Samsung are really copies of those produced by Apple they are in fact quite poor copies. There has been a fair amount of criticism about the phones because of several technical glitches that have occurred with them. There have been several attempts to fix the software but none of these have solved the problem. Since other smart phones that run the Android operating system don't have similar problems there is good reason to believe that it is a hardware issue, that being the case the blame rests squarely on Samsung.
Ultimately there is no way to say whether Samsung deliberately copied Apple in the design of their smart phones. It may well be that they designed their phones to have a similar look in an attempt to increase sales. If that was the plan it is hard to see how it would accomplish much since the phone itself is quite inferior to the iPhone. Ultimately the only thing that can be said is that they have build a smart phone that looks a lot like the iPhone but is probably not a deliberate copy of it.