In an ongoing Samsung apple court trial, Apple Inc. put a new allegation on Samsung. According to Apple, Samsung Electronics Co. got inspired from Apple’s icons and copied the same. The claim was supported with an internal Samsung document, which was presented to jury in California.
It was in San Jose yesterday that Apple revealed the 2010 Samsung internal report. The reports clearly showed the side by side comparisons of the Samsung S3 icon designs with iPhone. The report stated that Samsung did away with those icons, which were not user-friendly but copied the others.
Susan Kare, a former Apple graphics designer paid $80,000 to be an expert witness, said “The icons for the companies’ current competing products — both are square with round edges and displayed on the device in rows of four — are “confusingly similar.” Kare also told the jury Samsung Smartphone bore so many similarities to an iphone that she mistook the Samsung phone for an iPhone while visiting the office of Apple Lawerys.
“I would usually think of myself as someone who is pretty granular in looking at graphics and I mistook one for the other,” Kare said. “In addition to my formal analysis, I had the experience of being confused.”
Apple and Samsung are the largest manufacturers of consumer electronics and both are highly regarded in the market for their handheld devices which meet consumers’ daily phone and computing needs.
The patent battle has been waged on four continents for supremacy in the smartphone market valued by Bloomberg Industries at $219.1 billion. Both the companies in their pursuit to win the battle are blaming each other of infringement of technology and design.
