Playing catch-up
It's not just in handset design where there are some distinct similarities between Samsung's smartphone operations and Apple's; there are some marketing parallels too.
Samsung has just announced the Galaxy S II smartphone has broken the record for the speed of a Samsung mobile device to hit three million global sales. The Galaxy S II managed it in 55 days, while it took the original Galaxy S 85 days to top the big three mil.
According to a short announcement from Samsung, Europe has been a big success story, with the UK specifically cited as a strong market for the Korean giant. Apparently Samsung has been the most sold mobile brand for the past 17 weeks over here. It also has 30 percent of the Austrian market and 36 percent of the Swiss.
Of course Apple set the precedent for crowing about its sales figures with its iPhone and iPad launches. This Samsung announcement needs to be put in some perspective, and Apple's latest quarterly figures reveal it sold 18.65 million iPhones and 4.69 million iPads during the quarter.
While this is just one Samsung device, the comparison does illustrate quite what a sales juggernaut Apple has become, and the challenge faced by even its biggest competitors.
On that note the legal dispute between the two companies, which originates from Apple's assertion that the Galaxy family of mobile devices copy its design ideas, escalated a fair bit over the past week. The culmination was for Apple to file a motion for preliminary injunction against four Samsung products - Infuse 4G, Galaxy S 4G, Droid Charge, Galaxy Tab 10.1 - in the US.
According to FOSS Patents, if Apple succeeds in this filing Samsung could be forced to withdraw the products concerned from the US market within a couple of months of the motion being granted. On the flip-side, however, Apple's case against Samsung could be weakened if it's denied, so this is a high-risk move from Apple.
