[guelo]

What's most incomprehensible to me is that they really don't need to do any of this. They are winning in the marketplace, they are making the best products by far and they are raking in record levels of profits. Why stoop so low when you don't need to?

[ChuckMcM]

This is what bothers me as well. Its one thing to be some 'wanna be' player who is struggling for market share, its quite another to be the gorilla in the market and to pull stunts like this.

I suspect that they do it because they can do it, and frankly I hope the whole "design patents" issue goes the same way the "look and feel" lawsuits went in the 90's, which is to say "Its not exactly the same, deal with it."

[cageface]

Not to mention that they have liberally borrowed features from Android for the last two major iOS releases. Folders, the notification system, cloud integration, OTA updates etc. If you're going to take such a self-righteous stand on borrowing then you better be lilly-white yourself.

[mattmanser]

Given that Android was such a complete and utter ripoff of iOS I don't think a couple of features is much to point out. Lets put it in perspective here.

I think Android's great, but seriously, come on. There's homage and there's 'shit, touch phones rock, we need to completely copy iOS now!'. Which is exactly what Google did.

[cageface]

Android was obviously heavily inspired by iOS, but most of the new features in iOS 4 & 5 seem to have been borrowed in the other direction. The stuff Google is doing with live widgets and the status bar in 3.2 is advancing the state of the art and it would be a shame to see this kind of real innovation stamped out.

[recoiledsnake]

I think both are kind of a touch based ripoff of this: http://img.tfd.com/cde/_PROGMAN.GIF

Only WP7 seems to bring something really new to the mobile UI table.