said by itguy05:If you look at early Android prototypes they were pretty much rip offs of Blackberries. After the iPhone was announced/released they rushed it to look like iOS.
*sigh*
One year the matte silver look is in for home entertainment hardware. The next year matte black is in. Then shiny black. The following year some other look is in. And every manufacturer of home entertainment hardware pretty much follows that year's trend. Same thing happens in clothing, automobiles, kitchen appliances, you name it. Most everybody is a "rip-off" of somebody else, if you're going to look at it that way.
Perhaps at the time the first Android-based phone was being developed ("Android" is an O/S, not a product), phones like the Blackberry and my Palm Centro were pretty much the way everybody expected phones to be. (Was the Centro a rip-off of the Blackberry, or the other way around? Treos, and other Palms, were out there for a long time.) Then Apple came out with the iPhone and pretty much proved that, yes, people
would tolerate a touch-screen-only phone. (How many of you recall the debate over whether the iPhone would succeed, with no keyboard?) It proved wildly popular. So competitors thought "Hey, people really like that design. We better come up with a similar design."
You either follow where the market leads or you die.
Somebody has to be the leader. Often, in the consumer tech arena, it's Apple. Probably more often Apple than any other. But just because you're the first to do something new, doesn't necessarily mean you're the only one that can do it.
Jim
