GSMArena Blog

Your use of a car analogy here couldn't be any better placed. The reason why Germany has such strict laws pertaining to copyright, patents and design is due to the flamboyant duplication of their own motoring industry.

It seems your analogy however is far off, this would be more like copying a vehicle verbatim, but changing the colour and hood ornament.

It was unsurprising that Germany (and various other courts outside of the USA + South Korea) have seen in Apple's favour, See: http://i.imgur.com/TmUj2.jpg (In fact it seems that the USA lawsuit is one of the lesser successful cases for Apple.)

So when you're copying even the docking mechanism, it's clear that intentions went from "flattery" to "duplicate", and perhaps even a little bit of "make it the same so we can cut into their sales", which is just a nice way of saying, "confuse dumb consumers into buying ours."

The foundation of most of these laws revolves around the idea of what an average consumer could reasonably be confused by or mislead to believe. So when not even Samsung's own legal team are able to make a absolute distinction between the two devices you can bet that consumers will be having a similar difficulty. See: http://blog.gsmarena.com/judge-asks-samsung-lawyers-to-tell-the-ipad-and-galaxy-tab-10-1-apart-takes-them-a-while/

Also, a casual review of past samsung products also reveal that their design ethos has never approached this look and feel, while the iPad fits along the lines of many of their…

DDR4 is around the corner, PCIe SSDs are as well.

But the real improvement is battery life. Intel Haswell machines are lasting 10 to 16 hours now, and this number will only improve as Intel moves to 14nm and 10nm designs.

EDIT: Woops, I mean 22-hours. http://blog.gsmarena.com/toshiba-squeezes-22-hour-battery-life-out-of-haswell-powered-kirabook/

Computers aren't getting faster because no one cares about that. The majority of the design effort is now into battery life. A Dell Venue 8 Pro lasts 8+ hours on a single charge, on a tiny 20Whr battery (while being faster than the 4-year-old Macbook Pro). The 4-year-old Core2Duo Macbook Pros lasted only a couple of hours on behemoth 60Whr batteries.

Battery efficiency will matter when it comes down to lightness and style. Better battery efficiency will lead to thinner, sleeker, lighter designs. Generally speaking, the "progress" of modern computers is battery efficiency, leading to smaller batteries, leading to lighter and smaller computers.

Back in 2010, these two stop-motion shorts were each shot on the Nokia N8:
Dot [1]
Gulp [2]

Then in 2011, a short film and a feature-length were shot on the Nokia N8:
Splitscreen: A Love Story [3]
Olive [4]

Oh, and back when Apple announced their first iPhone, Steve Lichfield was already filming his Phone Show episode 22 on a smartphone, the Nokia N93. [5] For years he filmed with an N8, then a Nokia 808, and eventually Apple's camera tech caught up and he finished out his Phone Show filming on an iPhone.

[1] https://www.aardman.com/short-form-commercials/nokia-dot/
[2] https://aardman.com/short-form-commercials/nokia-gulp/
[3] https://vimeo.com/25451551/description
[4] http://blog.gsmarena.com/olive-is-the-first-full-length-feature-film-shot-completely-on-a-n8/
[5] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7FMHcG-M_FY.

I thought it had been done for Android first, and apparently it was, with winulator:

docs.winulator.com/programs

Edit: more info on GsmArena

http://blog.gsmarena.com/you-can-now-play-starcraft-and-caesar-iii-on-android/

"The Winulator doesn’t work like an emulator. It just converts an x86 game executable to an ARM-friendly one. Here is what you need to do.

You’ll need three things – a computer with installed Winulator Converter Helper, the original DRM-free game installed on that computer and the Winulator Android app installed on your phone."

Samsung's purported rationale for dropping the FM radio in the Galaxy S4:

Our studies show a trend shift of interest to digital broadcasting, specifically
– focus on listening to music content in social networks or on the channel
YouTube. The flagship model of our products are focused on customers who use
digital content, which use modern formats and channels of information
consumption. (translated from Russian).

http://blog.gsmarena.com/samsung-explains-why-galaxy-s4-lacks-fm-radio/

I can't image carriers are upset about it.