Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Analyst Angle. We’ve collected a group of the industry’s leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry.
By now, just about anyone who follows technology knows that on Aug. 24, nine jurors in California voted in favor of Apple with the largest patent lawsuit victory in history and awarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages. It also provided Apple with ammunition for more legal attacks on mobile device rivals. Samsung says they will appeal.
The case involved both hardware and software design issues, and it can be assured that this case will have far reaching implications for many years to come.
Take a look at the devices and user interfaces above for the four popular mobile operation system platforms: Apple iOS, Google Android, RIM BlackBerry 10 and Microsoft Windows Phone 7.5. From a casual (and not certainly legal point of view), it’s clear that the Samsung and Apple devices and user interface are “quite similar.” The question was whether these similarities were legal or whether they violated Apple’s designs protected by their patents.
Apple claimed that Samsung willfully copied Apple’s hardware and software smartphone and tablet designs – that they violated patents developed by Apple for the design of the iPhone, iPad and iOS. The California jury agreed that Samsung had, in fact, copied Apple’s designs and, therefore, ruled in favor of Apple.
Samsung clearly could have made their designs different. Look at the very different way that Microsoft and Research in Motion have approached their user experience: they utilize very different icons, tiles and expressions while still giving the user an intuitive way to get things done.
Since the Samsung smartphone and tablet products utilize the Google Android operating system, it stands to reason that Apple will most likely require Google to change the user interface in Android. Google certainly has the resources to make their OS user experience more creative and different from Apple. I hope this can get resolved without messy and expensive litigation.
There’s an even bigger (and likely non-litigious) issue looming on the horizon. I believe that all of mobile operating system user interfaces are going to evolve over time to integrate more cloud services and make it easier to find and use applications. Even Apple will migrate away from “just a bunch of small icons on the screen” to ways to enable users to more easily interact with information that’s important to them. It will be important for Apple to continue to innovate and keep their user experience differentiated from others.
The verdict could be a boon to Microsoft’s Windows Phone, which has licensed Apple’s design patents for the platform, and has noted that Windows Phone is very distinct from both Apple’s iOS and Android.
Intellectual property rights are clearly alive and well in the United States, and we hope that all other countries will act in a similar, respectful manner. No one should be out to copy someone else’s intellectual property. No one should be able to copy Facebook’s user experience just to compete with them, e.g. “See, we use a different color for our social network.” “Yes, but the user experience is exactly the same as Facebook. Go develop something that expresses social networking in a different way.”
There are plenty of opportunities to be creative and find ways to enable people to easily interact within any product and service. This court ruling should be a boon to those involved with creative design and engineering. It also suggests that more time and effort should go into creating an innovative user experience before building it, rather than making a product look and behave like another product or service simply as means to quickly get into the market.
We look forward to seeing new mobile and wireless products that incorporate innovative design and give users a reason to “switch over” from what they have been using in the past.
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D. is Principal Analyst, Mobile & Wireless at MobileTrax L.L.C. As a nationally recognized industry authority, he focuses on monitoring and analyzing emerging trends, technologies and market behavior in the mobile computing and wireless data communications industry in North America. Dr. Purdy is an “edge of network” analyst looking at devices, applications and services as well as wireless connectivity to those devices.
