Apple logos in backdrop for Samsung in-store display
Samsung is looking more like a stalker as it tries to fight claims from Apple that it has a copycat streak.
- Finalist for the Nesta Tipping Point prize and a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Samsung may dispute Apple's claims that it has a habit of ripping off products from Cupertino, but apparently their interior display designers have less of an issue with swiping little bits of Apple's intellectual property. Curiously, the icons for Apple's iTunes App Store and Safari make up part of the background for this Samsung "store in a store" display in Italy--despite the fact that neither run on Samsung's Android, Windows, or Bada-based devices.
Without a fantastic investigative journalism budget that would allow me to fly to the Italian store in question on the company jet on a moment's notice, I'm left to assume one of three things has happened here:
1. The display was left over from another mobile promotion and only truly nitpicky geeks like us and the folks at All Things D would ever dream of making an issue about a few little icons that only the aforementioned geeks would ever recognize anyway.
2. Samsung has a terribly backward understanding of the meaning of the term "product placement."
3. Samsung is stalking Apple. It has Korean factories making nothing but black turtlenecks and jeans. It also has that Safari icon tattooed on its buttocks. And sometimes it just slips up.
You can decide for yourself what the most likely explanation is, but Samsung doesn't have a great track record here. Back in 2008 it let it slip that a version of Safari was going to be coming to one of its old-school Symbian phones. Turns out they meant "s60 safari," which is a different browser based on some of the same components as Apple's browser, but it still belies the company's apparent ignorance of the concept of a trademark.
Well, at least one mystery may have been solved here. Perhaps we now know what became of the errant promotional backdrops for those s60 safari phones.