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In reply to the discussion: Soaring iPhone 5 sales in US knock Android into second place [View all]Xithras
(16,191 posts)Personally, when I hear an Apple fan ranting about Samsung, it simply confirms their cluelessness of the subject. Android and Samsung aren't the same thing. The recent Apple and media fixation on Samsung overlooks this one basic and incredibly important fact: Samsung had NOTHING to do with the development of Android. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
When Google was developing their internal prototypes, they did it with HTC. The first Android phone was the Google Nexus, which was manufactured by HTC. The first third party Android phone? The HTC Dream. Samsung was a bit of a latecomer to the Android world, and they're one of more than a dozen companies making Android devices today. If Samsung were to pull out of the phone market today, it might give Apple a little bit of breathing room, but it certainly wouldn't eliminate the competition (the fact that Samsung is doing so well indicates that Apple is missing some major market points with their product, a void that the other manufacturers would quickly rush to fill).
It's a fact of history that Samsung was one of the device manufacturers that Google was demonstrating the Android OS to in late 2006. And what did Google show them? The Nexus One:
Samsung was shown this phone long before the first iPhone photos were released. Take off that trackball and tell me what you see. Then, of course, there's the F700 thing. No, I'm not talking about the debunked claim that it preceded the iPhone, but the very factual reality that a fully functional F700, with that very design, was demonstrated at CeBit 2007 a mere 29 days after Jobs gave the world its first glimpses of the iPhone. Once again, absolutely NOBODY with a background in electronics engineering believes that Samsung could have designed a complete touchscreen phone with a fully customized touch OS in only 29 days. I've worked with some extremely talented engineers over the years, and none of them could have pulled off an engineering feat like that.
Anyone with a modicum of understanding of the subject understands what happened here. The facts are clear, they are well documented, and they are solidly on the side of Google. The touchscreen was not new. The form factor was not new. The technology was not new. Both Google and Apple were working on their platforms for MANY years before they were released to the public. This can be confirmed by anyone who knows how to use a search engine. Apple has always had a culture of secrecy and kept the iPhone under wraps, but Google does NOT and NEVER HAS. There are literally HUNDREDS of articles on tech news sites and blogs discussing Google's Android OS and phone development, starting YEARS before the first models were shown to the public. Google has a terrible track record when it comes to keeping secrets, and the fact that they were developing a smartphone OS has been public knowledge since 2004.
You can believe what you want, but there are simply no facts to back up that theft claim. The only thing Google stole was Apple's limelight.