Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm sure this will be downvoted into oblivion but I have Karma to burn preaching some truth. Between big phones (even the small iphone 6 is bigger!), the watch and NFC, Apple is clearly repositioning themselves as fast followers and letting Samsung et. al. foot the bill on R&D and market building. First, there's not much (if anything) they have gotten off of Samsung about these devices, except maybe how not to do s…
> And obviously the same thing holds for the Watch and the bigger iPhone: they were in development for at least a couple of years, iterating and refining them. Sources or guessing? I think the similarity of how the iWatch and the Android watches work is too similar to be a coincidence. There's some cool software work on Apple's watch, and I believe it'll generally be a better product overall. But it looks just like s…
Neither. For one, it's obvious that any such products needs at least 1-2 years to design, manufacture prototypes, etc. Second, we've seen several previous exposes of how Apple developed new stuff (iPad was in the labs for 7-8 years, the iPhone the same, etc, and there have been galleries of the tons of prototypes they checked published). So, I was basically just stating the obvious.
>I think the similarity of how the iWatch and the Android watches work is too similar to be a coincidence
Well, people already had a uncanillity similar experience to Android watches 5 or so years ago, by strapping an iPod mini to a wrist strap. It's a watch that talks to a smartphone and has a computer screen, so of course its similar in that, but that's inevitable. The kind of interface, the controls, the fashion styles for the straps and everything, and the internal design / sensors / etc are unique.
>Basically your story doesn't make any sense. The public story is that all Samsung knew was "Apple is working on a watch", and with that information, completely independently tossed together (with a little help from Google) a device that, in the Gen 2 version of Android Smartwatches, just so happens to work almost exactly like the iWatch minus the nub. The probably of that happen are only slightly less than throwing a bunch of parts into a dryer and at the end of the cycle getting a clock.
For one, the "almost exactly" is only in the sense that one car and another car do mostly the same things. The design, controls, software and everything is different, from the "nub" to the style choices to the sensors to the charging, to the e-payments, to the app selection UI etc. The Samsung version is sub par in every way.
>If Samsung developed the smartwatch based on nothing more than a rumor and just slapped it together, then they did one hell of a job because that's the template all new smart watches are currently following and they deserve a little more credit. (...) Samsung slapped together a watch based on a rumor, the gen 2 devices were pretty good and Apple simply went the direction with the idea that Samsung had pioneered.
What are those ideas again? Can you name one thing Samsung did that was a) non obvious part of a smartwatch, b) better?
