But is putting finger-sized icons on a mobile device something that Apple "invented"? It's not exactly a new technology or concept, it's simply obvious. I recall owning an iPaq that did the same thing years before the iPhone was released. And for that matter every old fashioned telephone ever produced had finger sized icons.
It's not the finger-sized icons that are the issue. What makes it very similar to the iPhone are:
* the general smooth, rectangular shape of the phone, including a large, center button below the screen
* a color-coded section of four buttons at the bottom of the screen that take up the whole space and include "phone", icon on the left-most side.
* a speaker in a thin-rectangular shape above the screen.
There are a great number of small differences between them, but they are very, very similar. Compare the new Samsung phone with a regular Android UI (e.g. http://www.techwhizz.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Android-... (from http://www.techwhizz.com/feel-android-2-3-gingerbread-cyanog... ) and notice that, while the two user interfaces accomplish similar things and both use large buttons, the Samsung UI is incredibly and inappropriately close to the iPhone's, especially if Apple has made a point of claiming that precise format as their own.
I'm against overuse of patents and trademarks, but even to me these are very clearly too similar.