Except that with the other manufacturers, it probably has been a patent cross licensing, something that Apple has refused to do from the start.

And Apple built his iUniverse around infringing products, as it refused to license the technologies (waiting for some court to come to help)... IANAL but there is clearly a damage to the other players as Apple may not have been able to enter the market like he did should he have paid for the licences from the start... At that time, it was far from "some little money out of a big warchest"...

Let's build a big colony on the moon, Mars of even further and send there all these lawyers and IP specialists... they are hurting society more than doing any good.

This would also include most of RIAA/MPAA/... staff and all copyrights trolls...

Planet would be better without them...

Basically, all sites where a user can leave a comment, a file, a patch, ... can be affected. Aswell as any site who are hosting a project which displease to any copyright holder (may it be a compétiting software (open source ?), reviews of some hardware or other)

So, beside some very closed sites like Oracle, Microsoft, ... (and other with enough market power), any other web site will be affected... chilling effect, false claims and other are lurking...

You keep the same form factor (and thus, the same (or nearly the same) battery) but you change a few chips
- more powerful 3D accelerator... which means more electricity hungry
- dual core processor instead of single core
And some other hardware increase which are electricity hungry. Even when you're on standby, the battery (which didn't change as it would have required a bigger case) will empty faster... and when you're actually USING these new performances, the battery will drain very fast.

In software, Apple can make the phone spend more time in "sleep" mode, with processor speed lowered and some subsystems turned off, but you can't bring it down to what iPhone 4 was. And when you're using the phone for 3D games and such, you'll probably be back to 1/2 day of battery expectancy.

Somehow, UNESCO did something he didn't have to do : it's clealy NOT the role of UNESCO to decide that a country exists or don't exists. It's up to the UN to take that decision. Until then, Palestine has no legal existence.

Most computer work 'out of the box' with current Linux distributions. Hardware problems are less and less frequent.

For the graphic card, you only have to boot in correct VESA mode and use VesaFB X11.

For the wifi, you've a way to use windows driver (Mandriva has it as an options as soon as at install time)

I've sometimes had less trouble installing Linux on a laptop than installing XP... All hardware being detected at install time with Linux when windows needed that I downloaded drivers (from Linux) in order to have both NIC and Wifi running, nvidia driver, SP2 (for the sound card), ... not speaking of the trouble of having XP install on a SATA system without floppy disk...

Microsoft can give the soft for free, but here, they'd have to also donate some hardware which is way less probable...

By the way, that same hardware design was already present in a 1969 film called 2001 A Space Odyssey...

The icon-grid can be tracked back to Xerox' work (which was stolen by both Apple and Microsoft... Which is why Apple got denied when he tried to block Windows). We can find it on Palm Pilot devices (I already had an icon grid for the application launcher on my old Palm IIIxe monochrome)

Capacitive sensors were already used more than 20 years ago (I remind seing some of them on some microwave) and you can find some tools "out of the box" from microchip to make capacitive control panels (including sliders, buttons, switches and x-y zones)... Oh... and I should check but I think that it's the same technology which is used on touchpads on PC and Mac for years.

Tablet computers were already done by Microsoft (which was a big failure... well, Windows is not really made for tablets)

Gestures ? Well, ask to a 8year old boy who never saw an iPhone/Android, tablet,... what gestures he may do with one finger, with two fingers and you'll probably get the same list that Apple is trying to protect... It's trivial and as such can't (oops.. shouldn't) be patented.

On the other hand, Apple refused to pay for the 3G/GSM/... licences, saying that these should be covered because they are buying chips made by other who should have paid these... They have a lot of litigation about these technical patents (that can only be understood by people who are electronics engineers with telecom specialisation).

So, well, I'd like to see iPhone 4S Banned from Whole Europe and Korea... It could teach to Apple one basic law : "A bad peace is always better than a good war".

It's perfect timing to take a revenge against Apple and it's actions towars Galaxy Tab... And maybe kill the whole iPhone market in the long term.
Apple lost it's Guru, Steve Jobs. Markets are waiting to see how things will go... If Apple get one big backlash it's stock value will probably fall down and Apple could be pushed back in a corner like it was before in the Macintosh vs PC.
Unlike a few years ago, there are now viable alternatives to the iPhone. Android Market is catching up (faster growth, quality of application increasing, ...), several android phones have a better hardware than the iPhone 4 (maybe even a better hardware than the 4S), Android is now known and has earned recognition,...

Dual core processor... what you can find on other (slimmer) phones for months
8MPixels camera... You also find it on other phone... And the size of the camera is barely different... The biggest part is the lens which didn't have to change.
Voice recognition, available on Android for long
There is nothing big about the new iPhone 4S... it's only trying to play catch-up with the other smartphones... And, yes, it's the best iPhone as each iPhone is better than the previous one (otherwise, nobody would purchase it).

Oh... and about their A5 chip... more than 95% of it is "common IP cores" that can be found in many other chips... ARM core, 3D core, RAM, ... But it's more sexy to say "our brand new ultra-secret processor called A5" than to say "Our brand new ARMv7 two cores, 1GbRAM,XXX 3D core,...chip".

And iOS5 will probably be available to other Apple devices... Those with older devices being left in the cold.

If I'm correct, it's about some 3G patents... They didn't attack Apple before (for the previous phones) because patent war was not declared at that time.
Since that time, Apple had the Galaxy Tab 10.1 banned from Germany and tried to have it banned in whole europe.
Samsung could go after all the iPhone but it would not make any sense. first, they'll have some trouble preventing them being sold as Apple is likely to stop selling them and only selling the 4S and they can't get these called back from consumers. It's also much easier to get a ban (and a trial saying Apple is infringing) on ONE product then ask for damage&interests for the previous products in a separate trial.