The late Steve Jobs vowed to "destroy" Android, Google's open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets, according to biographer Walter Isaacson. He was reportedly willing to "go thermonuclear war on this" and "spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank," in order to bring Android down.
Besides the iPhone and iPad -- the latter of which has consistently beaten all Android tablets put together as far as sales go -- Apple's primary weapon in its ongoing war against Android has been patent lawsuits against Android device manufacturers. Its first suit was filed in March 2010, just after the Nexus One was released, and since then it has won import bans and sales injunctions against Android devices like the Galaxy Tab (most of which have since been reversed).
Things haven't been one-sided for Apple, though, and it's facing some unintended consequences from its patent lawsuits. Here are a couple of them:
They showed everyone how to make a non-infringing tablet
The cornerstone of Apple's case against Samsung was that Samsung's Galaxy Tab resembled the iPad very closely. Apple was shown to have doctored the photos it submitted as evidence, but many of Samsung's devices nonetheless bear such an uncanny resemblance to Apple products that photos of the two have become the stuff of Reddit parody.
At one point in a recent lawsuit, however, Apple commissioned a private inventor to submit a document explaining its competitors' options for making a tablet that Apple won't sue them over. The suggestions included "shapes that are not rectangular with four flat sides," and "front surfaces that are not completely flat or clear," or that have a "cluttered appearance."
Because of this, writers like Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch have expressed disbelief, calling the iPad "the tablet's Platonic form." Others have parodied Apple's suggestions by creating absurd concept designs of non-infringing tablets, or noting that the "Pyramid" tablet from the comedy television series The Office would pass Apple's test.
It increased customer awareness of Android tablets
As John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out: "The overwhelming majority of the media coverage I've seen for the Galaxy Tab is related to Apple's various lawsuits. ... I don't think there can be any argument that it's raised overall awareness that the Galaxy Tabs even exist."
The article that he linked to quoted a Samsung exec as saying that " the media awareness certainly made the Galaxy Tab 10.1 a household name," especially compared to how much it would have cost to market the tablet. He also said that Samsung might not be able to import enough Galaxy Tabs to meet local demand in Australia.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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