Rage has been out for iOS devices for some time. Perhaps this is the first major game release that came over from the Apple touch-based devices first?

--Len

While the headline is accurate, it very optimistically misleads by omission. This was not the newsworthy portion of the judge's ruling. All of Google's other attempts for summary judgement that were submitted at the same time were denied. Google had attempted to reduce the case to a patent-only licensing case, but the judge saw their actions as a much larger copyright issue. The only thing he threw out was the file name copyright claims, which Oracle was silly to include in the first place.

The headline is almost the same as saying that a glass with one sip of water in it is practically overflowing. The implications of the ruling for anyone that ever copied a header file, but wrote their own implementations, are huge!

--Len

The problem is that Samsung et. al are throwing inferior, more expensive knock-offs into the marketplace, hoping to capitalize on Apple's ground-breaking success. If Samsung didn't try to ape almost every detail of the iPad, then these suits wouldn't have happened.

To many people, if it looks like an iPad, it is one.

Think about it this way. What does a ThinkPad look like? Whether it was made by IBM or Lenovo, it has a distinct style (industrial design) that sets it apart from every other Wintel laptop out there. Same question for Samsung mobile devices? Today, they look near identical to Apple's stuff, which was original in concept and imlementation when released. Galaxies Tabs look like IPads. Most Android phones look like iPhones, instead of the Blackberry/Treo/Sidekicks that they looked like in development, prior to the iPhone.

-- Len

The best one is the one that does the most things you would like to do, in a stable manner.

Right now, for most people, that would be the iPad. Apple has their shit together, and that just cannot be said of ANY Android tablet maker or even Google, at this point in time. They just passed something like 100,000 iPad-specific Apps in their store. I have friends who are anti-establishment types (big Android fans), who have published an iPad app, and won't even consider producing an Android version. As new developers, they want to be paid, and pragmatism is a very good idea.

Sorry, but until Google steps up and blesses a reference standard like a Nexus Tab or something, the Android tablet market won't have any "best" tablet. Until Google steps up with a real tablet SDK and a good emulator, the hurried and shoddy Android tablets will always take a back seat to the iPad.

On a side note, the history of Android and iOS devices should be considered when looking at this market disparity. Apple started with the tablet first, and shrunk it down into a phone. Sure, the iPhone preceded the iPad to market by three years, but the tablet touch interface was being developed for the better part of a decade before it was shrunk down for the phone. In both iPad and iPhone/iPod renditions, the devices were clean-sheet from the ground up. Apple got it right on the tablet, and then worked to get it right on the phone. The delay in releasing the iPad was most-likely due to needing the silicon to catch-up, so that the user experience wouldn't suck. Apple has fast emulators for both the iPad and the iPhone, and targeting either device with a common codebase is very easy.

Android, on the other hand, started out using the Microsoft Windows Mobile reference platform for hardware. The initial designs (pre-iPhone) looked much closer to Blackberries, than the now-omnipresent iPhone/Touch form factor. The first Androids were hobbled by their MS-designed roots with goofy memory management, and all Android manufacturers are still paying Microsoft for the privilege of using their crappy design. Android tablets grew out of this, with the added technical problem that any manufacturer could do whatever the hell they wanted to do. Until Honeycomb, all Android tablets used ugly (fragile) hacks to scale up phone interfaces. From Google's own admission, they did the same for Honeycomb, and won't be releasing the source because of it. Hopefully, they will eventually get it right.

-- Len

Apple asked to see physical prototypes with intended packaging of Samsung's announced and shown devices, for trade dress issues that their suit involves. They are not going after all future Samsung devices, just ones that have been shown publicly and bear a very strong resemblance to Apple's products. Their claim appears to have merit, as Samsung performed a crash redesign of the Galaxy Tab 10.1, when the iPad 2 was revealed, arriving at a near identical design being shown month later. This happened as they dumped their stock of their original design that looked like the first iPad, but in black rather than aluminum.

    Samsung's wants to see Apple's unannounced and non-public prototypes, because it just wants to see them (cuts down on copying time). Their new demand is unrelated to their countersuit, and may just be a delay tactic.

--Len