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19 March 2024

Apple vs. Samsung, Round 1 goes to... BlackBerry

Published
By Vicky Kapur

So it turns out that, despite the “major” legal victory, Apple will have to wait until December to permanently ban eight of Samsung’s older devices from being sold in the US. Meanwhile, Samsung releases new phablets (Galaxy Note 2, unveiled today) and continues to sell its flagship Galaxy S3 mobile without any encumbrance.

Apple, on the other hand, is reportedly putting the final touches to its fabled iPhone 5 (or whatever it chooses to call its new phone) for a release next month.

Despite the $1bn fine and the $12bn loss in Samsung’s market capital (by the way, Samsung’s share prices are inching up again), it’s back-to-business for the two tech titans, launching new products and phasing out old ones.

Rumours, however, abound that now that Apple has drawn first blood, and once it gets the eight Samsung devices removed from US market, it will try and do three things in a hurry:

a) replicate the legal success it just managed at home elsewhere in the world (wherever it can) by using the US court order as God’s gospel in countries that will admit it as such.

b) try to add other hot-selling Samsung devices (the Galaxy S 3, for instance) to the list using the tried template.

c) add other major Android-based rivals – Google, HTC, etc. – to the list of defendants to try and litigate their products out of specific markets.

And it will do these things not necessarily in the order I’ve mentioned. So there’s every chance that more devices will be blocked out of consumers’ reach. Not just that, in the consumers’ minds, an even greater number of devices will fall under the ‘don’t touch’ category as they will be perceived as candidates of a future ban. Who will want to buy a device today that will get banned tomorrow and therefore might not get the necessary support and regular upgrades, eh?

In all of last week’s brouhaha, however, Research In Motion, the makers of the once-mighty BlackBerry phones, must have thought about how they can, if at all, use this opportunity to come back from the brink and shorten the gap between them and the obvious leaders.

Recently, RIM has been showing off its upcoming BlackBerry 10 devices to select media in ‘off-record’ demos. Analysts who have tested the new smartphones say they look and feel better than BlackBerry’s previous attempts.

Now, BlackBerry 10 may or may not include NFC, or near-field communication, when it eventually hits the market in early 2013, but it may be already late for RIM by then to take advantage of the chaos prevailing in consumers’ minds right now about which devices are in danger of being added to the “infringing” list by Apple and therefore could face an eventual ban.

Now is the time when BlackBerry – and, don’t forget, Microsoft – should be spitting out most of their product pipeline into the market as, unlike Android-based devices in the market, their products don’t bear much resemblance to Apple’s devices and therefore cannot be construed as being copied or even ‘inspired’.

The court’s verdict could lead current Android phone-makers to call up Microsoft, RIM or even Nokia as the other ‘viable’ alternatives out there. Will these once-mighty companies rise to the challenge? Watch this space.

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