The Samsung line of Android based Galaxy Tab products are disappearing from store shelves in some nations, and it’s not because they’re selling out, but rather jammed up. Those in Europe and Australia are already finding that they can’t find themselves a Galaxy Tab 10.1, because legal woes have prevented the product from launching in the latter and are about to get it banned from the market in the former. This places Samsung in the trickiest of positions as it gears up to launch its next gen S2 line.
It all started when Apple decided that Samsung’s mobile products looked and felt way too much like Apple’s iPad and iPhone, to the point that Apple began fighting a (so far successful) legal battle around the world. The courts have thus far been agreeing that Samsung’s products like the Galaxy Tab are an infringement on Apple’s patents and designs, and now various government agencies have taken it upon themselves to prove the issue themselves. No less than the U.S. International Trade Commission is looking into the matter, which means that the disappearance of some Samsung products in Europe could ultimately follow with a banishment in the United States…
This doesn’t mean the end of the Galaxy line of products, as Samsung could always go back and redesign the hardware from the ground up using original ideas which don’t steal from Apple; the Android operating system would still be the driving force behind these redesigned products. And it doesn’t mean the end of Samsung either, unless Apple can successfully sue the company for so much money that it either agrees to bail on its Android products as part of a settlement, or financial woes from the lawsuits doom the company. The latter isn’t out of the question, as similar legal action against fellow Android-based hardware infringer HTC have resulted in such crushing legal rulings that HTC went so far as to initiate a stock buyback program in an attempt to convince shareholders that it wasn’t about to go out of business as a result of the ruling…
So what does this mean for upcoming Samsung products like the Galaxy S2? Anything goes at this point. It could be argued that nearly every Android based phone and tablet on the market has borrowed from Apple’s iPad and iPhone designs to varying extents, which means Apple can continue to go after these companies unless and until they scrap their current designs and come up with ones which don’t look quite so much like a fake iPad clone as they do now. That would of course lead to questions of whether the mainstream public would then continue to buy Android based products at all…
It’s been widely documented that aside from geeks who like the idea of a “wild west” mobile platform based on Linux which they can easily hack and re-code themselves, most among the mainstream public end up with an Android phone because they wanted an iPhone but their carrier didn’t offer it (or the salesgeek at the retailer was philosophically opposed to allowing anyone to buy one) and so the customer was convinced that the Android phone was “just like the iPhone” but better. The highly similar look and feel of the hardware played a big part in what many Android users now consider to have been a bait and switch game, with as many as forty-two percent of Android phone users having already decided that their next smartphone will be a real iPhone instead of an imitator. If Android phones suddenly start looking like vastly different hardware products instead of iPhone clones, this could serve to push that number even higher…
And that’s to say nothing of the Android tablet line, where products like the Galaxy Tab have had far less success against the iPad (naturally, with non-iPhone carrier influence removed from the equation). Change these products up so that they don’t look like a “Brand B iPad” and suddenly Android tablets may end up having even less success against the iPad. So while Apple may not succeed in getting Android based tablets and phones permanently banned from store shelves, its goal may simply be to ensure that the next generation of Android products looks so noticeably different from the iPad and iPhone that consumers will decide they have to buy the real Apple product in order to get the Apple experience they’re looking for. In the mean time, those Apple products may be sitting next to some empty shelves in the adjacent Android section.
