I think it was wrong for Samsung to blatantly copy the iPhone. But it's also wrong for apple to refuse to license certain design patents, when they are clearly

I think it was wrong for Samsung to blatantly copy the iPhone. But it's also wrong for apple to refuse to license certain design patents, when they are clearly superior. I think a lot of the gestures and interactions that Apple has patents over are so fundamental to touch screen device interaction, that not having them is crippling. It's like if Apple patented the mouse or the keyboard and monopolized the market. The slavish cloning of Apple devices and software and subsequent commoditization of the non-Apple market pushed RIM and windows phones into unrecoverable positions. Windows and Rim played by the rules and lost, google and samsung cheated and won. Not fair. I think these patent battles are pretty much a side-show and won't significantly affect android market share. We'll see though. Now on a more macro scale, is this a net win for the industry and consumers? The mobile market has consolidated into two camps very similar to how the computer market consolidated. Apple with it's full vertical integration and limited devices aimed squarely at high-end consumers. And Google taking the place of Microsoft with an OS that supports a large range of high-end to low-end hardware produced by outside manufacturers and much more open software ecosystem. I would argue that this kind of consolidation was inevitable, because it would be too much work for software developers to target a truly diversified mobile device market, each with their own proprietary APIs and quirks. It's too bad that OS developers never created a standard for universal API's for common tasks. Instead we got an endless onslaught of abstraction platforms like Java, the web and flash. When what we really need is OS-level support/standards for portable code. It doesn't really make sense that a game I write in C for one OS needs to be endlessly fucked about with to get it to run on another OS.