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Day 4: Samsung V Apple: What’s the difference between an iPhone and Samsung Galaxy?
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| What’s the difference between these two phones? |
Graphics guru Susan Kare can barely tell.
In fact, they’re “confusingly similar,” she told a US court yesterday.
Kare made the admission as the massive Apple V Samsung trial continues in California’s District court, where Apple is accusing Samsung of stealing its unique design technology and claiming $2.5 billion in damages.
Apple called in graphics guru Susan Kare, who worked on Apple’s original graphics for the Mac in the eighties, as an expert witness to prove its argument that its rival indeed did copy Apple unique design technology, reports WSJ who were present at the trial.
“I think of myself as someone who’s pretty granular about looking at graphics, and mistook one for the other,” Kare told the court, admitting mistaking Samsung’s Galaxy smartphone for an iPhone when she picked it up off a table.
“In addition to the analysis, I personally had the experience of being confused.”
The former Apple designer examined 11 Samsung smartphones in all to compare possible similarities to an Apple device and found:
“the overall visual impression on all of these screens — compared each one by one — compared to the screenshot from the iPhone 3G, were confusingly similar.”
Kare reckons Samsung home icons on the user interface screen of Captivate, Epic 4G and Galaxy S 4G screens all infringe Apple patents and the look and feel of its app icon design used on iPhone.
Samsung attorney Charles Verhoeven wasn’t taking the witness claims lying down, however, and presented the two competing devices side by side before the court, claiming there was two extra steps a consumer would have to go through to hit the UI and icons Kare claims are “confusingly similar” to the iPhone.
Verhoeven booted up the Galaxy and up appeared the Samsung logo, followed by an Android ad and Google’s search bar.
Only after these steps could a consumer go the UI apparently similar to iPhone, thus he argued consumers would find it hard to confuse the two devices.
Samsung attorney also pointed to Samsung “Fascinate” smartphone, doesn’t use the familiar rounded-square images as per iPhone.
“It’s not 100% different,” Kare said when quizzed about the similarities between the two devices.
She also admitted she had not examined the functionality of the competing devices but rather the look and feel.
Apple also called in another witness, Peter Bressler, yesterday who told the court he had examined iPhone design patent and found that Samsung’s products most defintely infringed Apple’s unique technology.
It also looks like Judge Lucy Koh is getting increasingly frustrated with both sides in the case first filed by Apple in 2010 as their respective lawyers argued over which version of their branded smartphones would be used in evidence.
“How many versions and revisions of these phones are produced?” she said. “Give me a break!”
