Live in San Jose: Apple v. Samsung

    As Apple slowly rose to become one of the world’s top smartphone makers, rivals like Nokia and RIM faded away. Others, like Google and Samsung, emerged. They learned the lessons of the iPhone, and we tracked their progress.

Stories about Google’s fledgling Android mobile operating system and its adopters were interesting, and I attended Samsung’s developer conferences that mainly focused on its handsets.

Things really got exciting when Apple sued Samsung for copying the iPhone’s user interface. Steve Jobs famously declared he was going to “go thermonuclear” on the iPhone copycats, asking for $2.5 billion to make an example of the Korean giant, which by that time had become one of the world’s largest makers of everything from LCD displays and memory chips to TVs and home appliances.

I hadn’t had much experience as a court reporter, but when the trial started in San Jose district court, I attended every session I could: It was a front row seat on some of the inner workings of two very secretive corporations.

EE Times curated on a web page dozens of my stories and slideshows of evidence, though many of the links no longer work. The opportunity to read some of Steve Jobs’ emails was one of many guilty pleasures.

I got nerdy thrills hearing folks testify about the inner workings at Apple, like the kitchen at the old headquarters on Infinite Loop where iPhone designers would casually gather.

In a calculated tradeoff of filing the suit, Apple’s penchant for secrecy came into the spotlight in testimony from folks like Scott Forstall (below), Apple’s senior vice president for iOS.

Jobs put Forstall in charge of the software team for the iPhone in 2004 but gave him “a difficult constraint. For secrecy reasons he didn’t want me to hire anyone from outside Apple to work on the user interface–but I could have anyone within Apple,” said Forstall (Hopefully, you can still read the full story here).

The software executive recalled how he called Apple developers identified as “true superstars” one-by-one to his office.

“We are starting a new project so secret I can’t tell you what it is or who you will work for, and if you chose to accept this role you will work harder than you ever did, working nights and weekends probably for a couple years,” Forstall told them. “Amazingly people accepted this challenge,” he said.

“We locked an entire floor down, put in doors with badge readers and cameras -- some took four locks to get in,” Forstall said.

Forstall described how in 2003 Apple had been working on a low-cost notebook computer “without a keyboard or hinge, and we settled pretty soon on one with a touch screen and not one that uses a stylus,” he said.

In 2004 when it was still building prototypes for what would one day become the iPad, designers had another idea. “We all had cellphones, we hated our cellphones -- they were flip phones at the time and we were asking ourselves if we could use in a phone the touch technology we were prototyping for tablets,” Forstall said.

Engineers created some basic prototypes showing a contact list and a phone dialer. “It was just amazing, we realized a touch screen that could fit in your pocket would work perfectly as one of these phones,” he said. “So, we shelved the tablet in 2004 and switched over to what became the iPhone,” he added.

Once the iPhone hit the market, Samsung’s execs were impressed, too.

“We’ve been paying all our attention to Nokia…[but] when our [user experience] is compared to the unexpected competitor Apple’s iPhone the difference is truly that of heaven and earth…it is a crisis of design,” said Hye-Sun Kim in an internal Samsung email Apple put in evidence without releasing Kim’s title.

“I hear things like this: Let’s make something like the iPhone…The iPhone has become the standard,” Kim said in the email. “Do you know how difficult the [Samsung] Omnia [handset] is to use?” he asked.

A page from Apple's court evidence

In an initial ruling, Apple was awarded just over a billion dollars, said to be enough to scare rivals trying to copy its look-and-feel covered by a handful of patents that, from my perspective as an EE Times reporter, seemed lightweight, more style elements than any hard-core technology.

At least one EE Times reader had a different opinion – the jury foreman.

Velvin R. Hogan (below), a retired electrical engineer, worked for 40 years on hard disk drives and earned two of his own patents before he got picked to lead the group.

Hogan was the most technical person on the jury that also included a mechanical engineer from a telecom company and an AT&T project engineer.

“When we got into the jury room to start deliberations, the first thing we did was a round robin, telling each other a little more about our backgrounds and asking each other questions. Then we took a vote to see who would become foreman,” Hogan said. (The full 1,500-word story is here.)

“The only thing preventing it being a unanimous decision [for me] was one dissenting vote--I voted for the project engineer,” he said.

Hogan detailed the jury’s process and the lightbulb moment when he came to his personal decision on the verdict

“If you accept the premise of intellectual property--regardless of what it is—it needs to be protected,” he said.

“I confess a few years ago when Congress let the patent office authorize trade dress and design patents, I was quite frankly not sure it was the right thing to do, but after being in this trial my position changed--IP needs to be protected if it is legitimate,” said Hogan who spent seven years fighting for one of his own patents and considered his time on the case the highlight of his career.

Ultimately, the headlines and the judgement did not significantly slow down the iPhone rivals that were already making bank in the market. A billion dollars for the likes of an Apple or Samsung was part of the cost of doing business.

Next: Visiting My Mobile Graveyard