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Relative Evaluation Report on S1, iPhone (2010) [pdf]
- amelius 2y ago... and they didn't leak the 200 ways in which S1 was better than iPhone. By the way, where is Apple's flip-phone?
- teekert 2y agoYeah, I mean that was the time where Android had a notification tray and iPhone didn't right? Perhaps they have such a document at apple and that's where their tray came from? Was copy/paste possible on the S1? I guess so right? Took a while on iOS. Anyway, props for Samsung for making such a document internally.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoNo props at all. It’s a completely normal product development artefact. Par for the course, and expected. The other document you hypothesise is called Samsung understanding their USP. Not everything is about some silly 2000s OS holy war. Behind all these tribalist fights are teams of people just…rocking up and building things. This is just how it’s done.
- cantSpellSober 2y agoThis wasn't a leak, it was filed as part of the Apple v. Samsung trial
- mabedan 2y agothe screenshots from Samsung look like a high school project compared to the iPhone ones. Granted, Samsung is in a much better place now compared to back then.
- tsudounym 2y agoI feel like they're in a worse spot because of how many Android competitors they have now. Back in 2010, they were the main 'alternative' to an iPhone, it was basically a duopoly for a few years - Apple vs. Samsung. Now there's the Google Pixel and a million Chinese phone makers so that Samsung doesn't stand out too much. They seem to be leveraging connections with carriers to push Samsung phones, which seems to keep them afloat.
- danaris 2y agoI don't recall which year it was, but at least one year back in that general time frame when the financial reports came out, Apple and Samsung together had taken over 100% of the revenue share in the smartphone market: that is, they were making profit (and Apple was making the lion's share), and every single other company in the sector was taking a loss.
- throwaway48476 2y agoThe opposite is true. There are many fewer android OEM's now, at least in the US. LG, Sony, Motorola, HTC, etc all quit or were bought out.
- sudosysgen 2y agoIs it? On the other side of the equation, there are tons of new Chinese Android OEMs: Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and friends, ZTE, Lenovo, Haier, Hisense. AFAIK all of these except ZTE and Huawei sell in the US, often under different brands.
- venatiodecorus 2y agoFWIW I've never actually seen anyone using any of these except ZTE (I'm in northeastern US).
- sudosysgen 2y agoThey do tend to sell under different names - Lenovo sells as Motorola, and Oppo sells as OnePlus. Before the ban, I'd also see a few Huaweis, also in the northeast. In Canada, Huawei used to be fairly common and TCL is still carried by many carriers as a budget option.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- seanalltogether 2y agoIt felt like it took a long time for the old guard to swing around to a touch-first interface after spending a decade or so building interfaces meant to be navigated with arrow keys below the screen.
- bzzzt 2y agoThe first iPhone was Apple's first attempt at a modern touch screen device too. I think the difference is mainly in the extreme amount of care for details Apple seems to have for everything user related.
- danaris 2y agoSure—but Apple had the advantage of being able to develop the whole thing fully to their satisfaction before revealing it (jury-rigged initial demo notwithstanding). Once the iPhone was revealed, everyone else had to scramble to catch up in real time, and many of them tried to just half-ass it—or, as the GP says, just weren't used to the paradigm and took a while to figure out how to do it well.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoFor most other companies, the shift to / focus on touch interfaces was reactive. Apple’s first (mass market) mover advantage allowed them much more time for extensive internal iteration. Remember, they started off with the iPad, err, Newton…at least.
- kodt 2y agoI had the first Android phone, the HTC Dream, and it still had a flip out keyboard and a mini trackball for navigation. I know the attitude among many Android early adopters was that going full touch-screen was bad thing and should be avoided. Apple was right in the end though.
- venatiodecorus 2y agoEarly touch screens (capacitive?) were also not great. I remember iPhone's being pretty decent, although I don't think I had one until the 3, but my memory is a bit fuzzy from that far back! They could be frustrating to use, and often the usable area for interactivity was smaller than the actual screen, with issues detecting touch at the edges.
- celsoazevedo 2y agoA faster mirror: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2024/436142-samsung-relative-evaluation-report-on-s1-iphone.pdf https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/2024/436142-samsung-relat...
- daghamm 2y agoEvery company should do this. In fact many do. This is called competitor analysis and is the fastest way to motivate employees and start improving things
- cantSpellSober 2y agoEvery company does do it. I'd like to see Apple's 2010 version for comparison. Something like: 1. Samsung has copy and paste
- amluto 2y agoMore introspection is needed to get this right. Apple has copy and paste. And they even had a sort of decent text selection at some point (iOS 16?), so their list surely still thinks that this capability is fully functional.
- cantSpellSober 2y agoNot sure what you mean, iPhone 1 didn't have it because "[Ken Kocienda] didn’t have time to do it right." https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1538536958258909184 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1538536958258909184 Once it was added (2 phones later) it was such a big deal they had an ad for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKjESdHPGB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKjESdHPGB0
- amluto 2y agoI misread the comment to which I was replying. Oops.
- planb 2y agoI don't want to be pedantic, but in fact point 13 in these slides says the opposite: Safari has copy&paste and the Samsung browser has not. That's the interesting difference: While Android may have been "first" to copy&paste, Apple would not have released the feature in a state where it does not work system wide.
- duxup 2y agoThis seems perfectly reasonable / common to do. A few days ago I made a similar list.
- retskrad 2y ago[flagged]
- dsalfdslfdsa 2y agoSuit yourself. Personally, I judge anyone who gets a smartphone out in public.
- criddell 2y agoSo when you see me pull out my phone to snap a photo of some graffiti I like or use it to translate a sign I can't read or message my wife to let her know I'm running late, what are you thinking?
- dsalfdslfdsa 2y agoI can google pictues of interesting graffiti any time I like. Taking a picture devalues the moment. I'm not sure where you are that you can't read the signs (but have cell service), but you would be really out on a limb if that's the case and you don't have anyone to help you out. I'd honestly find it kind of pathetic to watch. If it's so important to message your wife, then it's a better idea not do it while also trying to walk around in public.
- criddell 2y ago> I'm not sure where you are that you can't read the signs (but have cell service), but you would be really out on a limb if that's the case and you don't have anyone to help you out. I'd honestly find it kind of pathetic to watch. I guess you don’t travel often or maybe you can read lots of different languages. I can’t so my phone is useful. Which would you say is more pathetic - the guy and his wife trying to read a menu in a foreign language or the person standing off to the side watching and judging?
- dsalfdslfdsa 2y agoIf I'm somewhere where I can't read the local language nor is there anyone to ask to translate, then menu translation is the least of my worries. How do you do anything else, like pay, or arrange transport or accomodation? I would certainly judge if someone tried to achieve all of those things by waving a phone around and gesticulating at people. It's a neat feature, don't get me wrong, but a complete luxury (and only works out in relatively developed countries).
- joshstrange 2y agoGoing through those screenshots show just how stark the UI (not to mention UX) between iOS and Android was (is?). While I wouldn't relish going back to early iOS it still looks clean and polished vs the Android UI in the picture which is all sharp corners and UI that has no consistency or through-line.
- afavour 2y agoEarly Android UI was such a clusterfuck. Not surprising really given that it started as a BlackBerry-like UI then pivoted hard when the iPhone was launched. They also weren’t really in the position to finely curate their app collection so just about any shoddy UI got approved for the store. And then Google dedicated an entire version (3) to tablets only, leaving phones with a rapidly aging v2 UI for far longer than they should have. There are a bunch of alternate histories from that era, if MS had their shit together and launched the Windows Phone a little earlier I think it could have taken the place Android occupies today. Android really wasn’t impressive in the early days (and I say this as someone who bought a Nexus One day one)
- jeffbee 2y agoEarly Android was so bad it was impossible to believe that anyone had tried to use it before release. The first bug I filed against the Nexus S was that the camera app recorded video frames out of order. If literally anyone had tried the video function even once it would have been obvious. Total failure of dogfood testing.
- duskwuff 2y ago> Early Android UI was such a clusterfuck. Not surprising really given that it started as a BlackBerry-like UI then pivoted hard when the iPhone was launched. Don't forget all the early Android phones that launched with physical controls to navigate around the screen, like the trackball on the HTC Dream or the directional pad on the Motorola Droid. It's as if they weren't quite sure touchscreen interfaces were going to take off, so they wanted to hedge their bets.
- vel0city 2y ago
- drcongo 2y agoWhere's the rest of the document?
- pdpi 2y agoHonestly, now that I've seen this, I'm a little bit mad that I've never seen one of these for products I've worked on myself. I'd argue this presentation should be mandatory reading for product people everywhere.
- virtualritz 2y agoWhen I worked at a Nokia company, in 2014, someone sent me a copy of the board presentation on how the iPhone would fail and was not of any concern to Nokia's market dominance. Basically something someone had put together briefly after Apple presented their first phone. The hybris displayed in that deck was as flabbergasting as it was hilarious. Not even in retrospect. It was all about how Nokia had better screen resolution, battery lifetime, CPU speed. That the Apple UX was absolutely novel and superior was not considered at all.
- dang 2y agoRelated: Apple v. Samsung Evidence: 'Relative Evaluation Report on S1, iPhone' [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353762 - Aug 2012 (2 comments)
- duskwuff 2y agoWhat I find funny about this document is how obvious it is that Samsung's prime directive, at the time, was to do whatever Apple was doing. Even when that didn't make sense for Samsung to do, like suggesting that they add streaming radio functionality to their synchronization application because iTunes had that feature (page 80).