You can’t walk 10 meters at the giant IFA tech show in Berlin without seeing new Android phones and tablets. They’re everywhere.
Some, like Acer’s CloudMobile S500, are from a design perspective, a big improvement over theApple iPhone. Others, like HTC‘s Desire X are aimed and priced for mass-market consumption.Sony offered up a trio of Xperia Android phones including the Xperia T with a 4.6 inch display, 1080p resolution and a 13 mega-pixel camera that can start up immediately.
Several companies are showing innovative Android tablets. Lenovo, for example, introduced the Ideatab S2110A, an Android tablet with a keyboard/docking station that extends its battery life to 20 hours. Sony showed off the Xperia Tablet S, a 10.1 inch tablet with a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and a slimmed down design.
- Samsung even showed an Android powered camera, with 3G/4G connectivity, demonstrating the operating system’s versatility when it comes to the type of devices it support. I wonder if Apple will find some patents to try to snuff out the Samsung’s Galaxy Camera.
No slavlish copying
I’m not legal expert but it will be hard for Apple’s attorneys to accuse most of the manufacturers here of “slavishly copying” their designs as it did in the Samsung case. Even Samsung’s new phones and tablets are highly innovative in terms of physical design and added software.
Most innovations involve some “borrowing”
Of course companies here have “borrowed” ideas not just from Apple but from others including Xerox, Microsoft and to some extent even Research in Motion. Innovation rarely stems purely from one person or company’s imagination. Technology innovation is an evolutionary process that depends on companies seeing what’s already out there and finding ways to build something better, if only slightly better. Occasionally, as Samsung apparently did in some of its earlier phones there is little to no “added value,” but that’s not what I’m seeing here.
Samsung’s beats Apple in Japanese court
As I write about the strength of Android here in Berlin, I’m seeing news from Japan that Samsung beat Apple in a Tokyo court that rules that Samsung didn’t infringe on Apple’s patents on its methods of synchronizing multimedia content between mobile devices and computers. Bloomberg reported that court in Tokyo also denied Apple’s injunction request by Apple “to bar Samsung from offering 8 models of Galaxy products in Japan.”
Be the first to comment