iPhone copies LG's new Prada phone?

This quote from that page says it all. (FUD FUD FUD)

well, i think it all depends on patents nd stuff like that. apple should win, the iphone looks better

Stupidest FUD ever. How different are two portable full screen touch pads going to look? They are going to be blank surfaced rectangles, for god's sake.

And if they are phones, and you show the "phone dialing" interface, how are they not going to both have big buttons with numbers on them? Hey, I know, LG can show theirs displaying a web page next to the iPhone displaying the same web page. Holy shit, the New York Times looks the same!

It's like saying that your laptop is "strikingly similar" to another one because they both have a keyboard attached to a screen by a hinge and they are both black with roughly the same proportions, and if you take a picture with both of them showing a calendaring app you're proving something because both of them show the days of the week and the months of the year in the same format.

You cannot patent how something looks.

The LG phone is called "Prada". Where have I heard that trade marked name before? Humm?

If you've seen the video of the LG "Prada" (in French), it's essentially a beautifield single touch/scroll UI specialized for a small phone screen like seen on Palm and Windows CE/Mobile. Ie, touch this scroll bar and move it to scroll the screen down. Touch this icon, touch this virtual button. This is standard touchscreen UI stuff at least a decade old.

It's obvious look-n-feel will be different since Apple uses multi-touch gestures instead of what has been seen on Palm and Windows Mobile.

For the form factor, ie, "big screen" on a candy bar phone with few buttons, not sure that's patentable.

and OMG what a CRAPPY SLOW INTERFACE!! watch the video! The GUI IS NOT SMOOTH. POS. Same reaction I had to Zune, "... man... Why'd they even try?"

Of course you can... it's called a "design patent". When you patent a method or how something functions, it's called a "utility patent".

Err ... Prada are releasing the phone.

I'll be getting one to tide me over until the iPhone hits Canada. The fancy case will match my wallet.

Man, that video, just........ wow.

Side by side the vid of the iPhone demo and the vid of the Prada demo is like a case study in what makes Apple so good.

Nobody at LG to say, "Those transitions look like shit! Make it better, I don't care if you have to start from scratch!" Nobody to say "I want that done in 3 taps, not 5. Take it away and don't show it to me again until it's fixed." Nobody to design a beautiful, integrated interface. Nobody to sweat the details, and then sweat them some more.

Apple makes the hardware to embody their vision of how things should work. If the hardware can't be made, they wait till it can. LG puts a cobbled together interface on what was already there and calls it a day.

Well, these two phones look awfully similar to my eyes, folks...

The Apple iPhone and the LG KE850:





Here's the link:
http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2006/1...ble-chocolate/

That is an incredibly accurate statement, I think, and the source of every technophile's frustration.

And the pleasure of every non-techie consumer

What? It's a Prada branded phone.

Your eyes are fooling you. Similar doesn't mean copy. It's simply convergent evolution or convergent ideas. There is barely an original idea, ever. Even calculus wasn't an original idea from Newton; different approaches yes, but calculus nonetheless, let alone Archimedes almost achieving it ~2000 years before. The idea of having a phone that should be touchscreen-only isn't new, nor is it unique.

I really doubt this LG phone inspired Apple to copy it. Not to mention that the targetted release dates are like 2 months apart either. If they saw advanced versions of the K850, they would have laughably derided it like we are now. Such horrible UI is one of the reasons Apple thinks it has shot at being successful with a $500 to $600 "iPod cell phone internet communicator device."

Exactly.

I think every touchscreen phone will HAVE to have the same basic design, it's what you do with it after that that matter.

For instance the prada does not only have one button and the interface is reportedly pretty weak and it's most likely like a pda and only has single touch instead of multi.

If you're talking about the point of having the touch screen do almost everything then the old palm in my nighttable drawer collecting dust should sue apple to.

Every touch screen device will look similar, it's an occupational hazard.

New video and more pictures of the Prada: Italian site review or Gizmodo linkage

From looking at this new video, I'm weeping for it's UI.

Not the good sort of crying...

Yikes. That should end any talk of copying.

Humorously, at the 3:35 mark you see the demonstrator start trying to scroll down with the awkwardly placed touch scroll bar at the side. Nothing, nothing, tries tapping lower down, nothing, scroll.

Can you imagine how old that kind of thing would get? A touchscreen interface better respond instantly, and every time, or you suddenly realize your poking uselessly at a piece of plastic.

Yeah, the reviewer or demonstrator must have been thinking, "Work! God Dammit! Work!" throughout the video.

The LG Prada UI is just a poor implementation of your usual WIMP interface, but with fingers and without the menus. It looks poor, poorly implemented. The touchscreen UIs present in restuarants the world over, and old UIs at that, are better implemented.

The UI probably works better with two hands, but it's a tragedy of design choices. Enough to make you weep. Never mind touchscreen sensitivity and the like, the UI design choices. Ugh.

1. For text messaging, the Prada has a virtual T9 keypad UI? Holy floating spaghetti monster, what in Tartarus is LG thinking? The demonstrator took about 10 seconds to write the word "hi". And that was before typing in the number to send a message. One could probably do it faster by binary searching on a 10,000 word dictionary.

2. For the photo browser, LG didn't put in the effort to design a UI that 99.9999% of digital cameras have. It sort of uses something like that by implementing a file browser with thumbnail preview! Folders can be seen, but they don't have names. They have a Windows filmstrip type viewing in another browse mode. To get into the filmstrip, the demonstrator was thinking single-touch on the thumbnail or maybe double-touch on the thumbnail, but it didn't work. It was single-touch to select, pressing "browse" or something.

iPhone does it a little bit better, but I think a virtual scroll wheel should be popped up somehow to enable superfast scroll of thumbnails and viewing of photos. We've seen it in Apple's patent filing, hopefully, they'll use it.

3. Pet peeve. The Prada's UI for dialing phone numbers mimics a phone keypad. Argh! The numbers are made to look like a physical phone key pad, and it leaves a row of 20 pixels high doing nothing. Touchscreen UIs for cashier machines the world over do it better. It should maximize the space it has. The iPhone does this right.

On my Treo, if I wanted to manually dial, I have the option of using the stylus driven touchscreen key pad or the tiny number pad on the thumb board, each key all of 4 sq mm. Jobs is right, taking out the stylus is cumbersome, pressing the touchscreen sort of sucks (it leaves in a lot of empty space for some reason), and micro-buttons on the thumb-board aint fun. Not very conducive to dialing numbers at all. Of course, the primary way of making phone calls is either search through contacts or the call log.

Very well said, and an excellent deconstruction of that god awful "interface". Really, that video should be used every time someone starts talking about how the iPhone doesn't do anything new and existing phones have all the same "features".

Well, there it is, the closest thing (almost) on the market to the iPhone, that can "do" all the things the iPhone can, and is a hideous train wreck that I can't imagine anyone wanting to use.

The interface is the product. Bad interface on features equals useless. Amazing interface on features equals useful in new ways, for more people.

I agree that the LG phone is not as sophisticated as the iPhone I would not be too critical of it. In some ways its unfair to compare the two because LG does not have the same over all strategy that Apple has for its phone. The LG phone will find its market in people who want an iPhone but do not want to pay the high price.

For those who think Apple copied LG. Well both products were introduced at the same time. Its unlikely Apple knew anything about LG's phone. LG's software is all based on flash while the iPhone is based on OS X. Those are two completely different approaches. Something that Apple has had to have been working on for a while. Apple also bought the Multi-Touch technology two years ago, the LG phone is using general touch input.

This version of the LG KE850 will not, I emphatically repeat, will not find a market with people who want a cheaper iPhone. It's a Prada branded phone, with Prada supposedly co-developing, co-marketing the phone with LG. LG and Prada only intend to sell about 100 of them at 1000% margin (or something like that).

As such, this cell phone is being sold for 550 to 600 euro. That's $700 to $800! Maybe in 2H 2007, LG might sell a dumber version in the USA with a better price. It won't have the Prada brand on it though. Prada and cheap don't mix.

So, yeah, to be fair, the LG Prada isn't meant to compete with the iPhone, smartphones, or even feature phone. It's meant to be a style phone with Prada's name behind it. Apple's publicity stunt with the iPhone at MWSF pretty much killed the LG Prada's cache or style with a phone that does everything cheaper, better, more capable and is currently planned to be $200 cheaper. No wonder LG is thinking about suing.

Prada would have been better taking a SE W950 or Nokia N93 and replacing the casing with aluminum or magnesium, and gold plating it. They could even alter the UI to be more stylish. It probably won't make a big enough margin for them though.

I guess an all touch screen, minimal UI might have looked stylish to the Prada people right up until they saw the iPhone and thought "Oh shit, our expensive cool signature fashion statement all of a sudden looks like sixties calculator!"

I agree that the lawsuit looks like a bid to get some product awareness out there before the iPhone hits and they can't give these things away (although I suppose there will always be at a few people who would buy the Prada name if it was on an aluminum foil covered oven mitt).

Really? I hadn't heard that. Gizmodo says it will be about $500.

Product development times are so long that I don't understand how two weeks would make any difference. I think anyone that says "copy!" in this case is fooling themselves or are simply ignorant of what it takes to develop these things. If they want to make an accusation of industrial espionage, then that's possible but a little off the deep end as well.

There's only so much that can be done with a rectangular object, and it's the details that make the differentiation. The details are generally in the corners, edges, materials and colors, and three of those four are noticibly different between the two.

A few points:

2007 IF awards are for products released in 2006. Just like the 2007 Oscar winners will for movies released in 2006.

There is no "International Forum Design Award winner," and the LG phone didn't win it. There are a ton of winners, and LG was one of them. (Apple has "won" several of these as well.) IF awards (for design, materials, communication, concepts, etc.) are more branding tools (like "Made for Windows" or "As Seen on TV") than anything else. LG did not get the design award, but it did get a design award, along with dozens and dozens of other products. The 50 "Gold Award" winners, picked from the pool of "winners," will be announced March 15. So LG might not even get a "Gold Award," let alone "the" award (which, again, doesn't exist).

The fact that no "reporters" have bothered to look this up shows the sad state of journalism today.

This particular Gizmodo blog addition is pretty far in left field, in terms of the price. The very link that Gizmodo links to, Cellular Magazine from Italy, has it for 550 Euro. Most every other site has it for 600 Euro. The Prada will only be available in Europe and East Asia in the next few months.

Unless the exchange rate gets a lot better for the dollar this year, the blog entry is playing pretty fast and loose with numbers and currency. Who knows, he may be one of those people who only thinks in increments of 500...