Wow. This document illustrates exactly why design and attention to detail matters. In absolutely every comparison the iPhone just makes sense and works and the S1 has some kind of clumsiness. Very impressive, Apple.
Some of the examples are so poorly executed (on Samsung's side) that I can't think of any possible explanation for them beyond pure laziness. For example:
1. Landscape mode is only supported in Memo and Calculator when rotating
left, not when rotating right.
6. The buttons are cut off when the keyboard is visible.
11. Pressing NEXT changes the font to lowercase. Huh?
27. Long telephone numbers get cut off (instead of shrinking the font size
to fit).
36. Alarm settings buttons are cut off by the number pad.
None of these examples are particularly difficult to get right, as long as you have someone paying attention to basic UI design. What's amazing to me is that they actually shipped a product with these glaringly obvious deficiencies.
The first one was just not implemented in Android at that point, it didn't work for any app.
The second and last are also part of how Android works (/worked, not sure if it has been changed), because it's supposed to work on different screen sizes.
Of course it would have been possible for Samsung to implement those in Android, but I'm just pointing out it would be more work than just changing some values in the app. At the time of the S1 Android just hadn't matured yet.
Almost every "Directions for improvement" statement could be replaced with "Do it how the iPhone does it" and still basically be saying the same thing.
Some example "Directions for improvement" statements:
* Phone: Need to modify the call end button on the call screen so that it is a separate large button
* Calendar: The date displayed on the Calendar icon should match the current date on the phone
* Calendar: Need to modify by enlarging the area displaying daily schedule and the font size in order to address the low visibility
* PC Program: Need to [make some kind of change], like iTunes
Picturing myself as a Samsung engineer having finished reading that document, I could quite easily think "they just want us to copy the iPhone as closely as possible" even though the wording in the document itself doesn't explicitly say "copy the iPhone".
As a Samsung engineer I would think "they want us to stop making crap and learn from the iPhone". These are all cases where the iPhone basically does it the Right Way.
For every issue they explain why the iPhone does it well and the S1 not. To me it doesn't read like they want to copy the iPhone, but rather like they want to make it right (by copying the iPhone). Important distinction. This is consistent with their last direction for improvement: "Remove a feeling that iPhone's menu icons are copied by differentiating design".
The intuitiveness is why Apple makes great products. That takes time and money to do right. Everything looks obvious and simple in hindsight. This really makes me question my stance on software patents.
Thanks to the iPhone, Apple has become the largest publicly traded company in the world and stashed 100 billion dollars in the bank.
They did this without winning a big trial against Samsung, HTC or Google. I don't think Apple needs to win this or another patent trial to have the incentives to build top quality products. On the contrary, letting them secure a monopoly on all these good ideas might diminish the incentive for innovation. They already have ridiculous profit margins[1], which if anything indicates a lack of competition.
I would suggest we are not even talking about software patents but design and dress patents. I dont really think you can compare low level kernel algorithms to a visual design and dress patents. So to me thats an unfair comparison. In fact according to to other documents Ive seen, these are all dress patents being argued over.
Usability is technology. In every case in the document, it's, we got it wrong, the iphone got it right, let's fix it. Not, let's copy the look and feel of the iphone, it's purely a usability comparison not a style comparison.
A note of caution, this is a translated document. I have no experience with Korean but in Mandarin and Japanese a LOT of subtleties are lost when translated.
That said, you're probably right and it probably is a pretty accurate representation of how bluntly they wanted to grok the iPhone.
No! The document shows the areas where Samsung believes there to be room for improvement. This document does not mean that "in absolutely every comparison" the iPhone finishes first.
Double wow. This is a March 2010 document and the iPhone has already got copy and paste (was that iOS 3 or 4?). That means Samsung and Android had already been playing catch up for several years to get to this stage, this wasn't a comparison of their first prototype.
It is also disappointing that Samsung wasn't pointing out the iPhone and challenging their designers to do even better rather than trying to match Apple. Although maybe that happened later for the S2 and S3 development programmes.
Also without a good example to follow (although there were plenty of bad ones which probably all had some good parts) it is impressive how much Apple got right from the very beginning.
Based on Wikipedia, Android got copy and past marginally before iOS (April 2009 vs June 2009)
From my personal experience Android copy and paste is more reliable than iOS - I get quite a few web pages on iOS where I can't mark text to copy, turning JS often gets around this
I wasn't claiming copy and paste was first on Apple (or even best) but I recall that it wasn't there to start with which made me go back and check the date on this document. I had originally assumed it was a much earlier document and the Samsung interface being benchmarked was an internal prototype of a first generation Android but it seems it was an actual product and probably not the first (although I don't have mobile phone model histories in my head).
Of course the iPhone gets it right in every comparison, since the purpose of the document is to list cases where the iPhone is better and the S1 should be improved. Still very impressed by the difference in polish though.
What would be the point of an internal memo which only highlights areas where your company is doing better than the competition? Particularly when the competition is making a lot more money?
SWOT analysis exists to cover all areas, even Samsung must have heard of it and copied that as a methodology. Perhaps no Apple weaknesses were highlighted because there were none that Samsung could find.
