What did Samsung do that is shady, that Apple itself didn't? Apple was the first to market with the most-polished device, but all one has to do is look at the old Palm Pilot to know that they completely ripped off the design and layout. Who cares? Apple was already winning on their merits. I have a feeling people will look back on this as a major turning point in Apple's history. They are starting to look like a paranoid ruler worried about an imminent attack instead of playing offense they way they used to.
Right, any computer with square icons arranged in a table format must have originated from the Newton. How could anybody have figured out to put icons into rows and columns?
But seriously, Palm had an SDK and a phone with a touch interface and downloadable apps a good three to four years before the iPhone was introduced. Any brick with a touch interface does not fall into that category I'm afraid.
You wrote "they completely ripped off the design and layout" of the Palm Pilot. The iOS layout owes as much, if not more to the Newton than to the Pilot.
Any brick with a touch interface does not fall into that category I'm afraid.
Absolutely. For example, Microsoft managed to develop a touch phone interface that owes very little to the iPhone. Hopefully Samsung can do the same.
The Newton had an SDK, a vibrant developer community, and a user interface that was one big touchscreen rather than having physical buttons - in 1993. Palm actually got its start selling software for the Newton, specifically their "Graffiti" recognition engine.
If you want to argue about who had specific features first, Newton will usually win - PalmOS was stripped-down to be cheap and dependent on the PC it docked to whereas Newton was conceived as a standalone device so Newton could do things like print or send and receive a fax from day one - Palm got most of those features later if at all.
