Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and sting here with a little bit of a rant video going over something that thing has gotten way ridiculous and that is patents and lawsuits and all kinds of just craziness as far as phones and tablet manufacturers go now to start off with I wanted to start with a little bit of a story so bear with me here so earlier this month I was at CES with my friend Phil you guys probably know him as AI cryptic and so what we were doing is we were together and we were walking around hitting all the different booths and you know one was filming and one was like doing a little demo and some of the stuff was interesting like some phones and tablets we're interesting some of it wasn't but for the most part we were getting footage of pretty much as much as we could so if we thought hey this is very you know whatever we could just you know add the footage later it would all be good so at one point we're in a booth and we were looking at a tablet so Phil he pulls out his camcorder and I start giving a demo so I start swiping through the home screen I think it's like an Android 3.0 honeycomb tablet so swiping through it looking at the apps and you know just kind of just giving a general overview of it and halfway through I'm like wait a minute what's this called so one kind of weird thing was there was no plaque or anything about it so usually for the most part for example you know if it was like a Samsung Galaxy Nexus or whatever would have like a plaque saying the name you have some kind of information it's got like 4G and this and that you just kind of give you a little bit of background information but with this woman there was nothing it was just the tablet and it didn't look all that bad but it wasn't really anything that spectacular so about after a couple minutes Evgeny I'm messaging down with a little bit of rap walked up go hi can I help you I'm like yeah well what's the name of this tablet and the little guy looks at me goes oh it's the hi pad so I just wanted to tell that story just kind of say there are two sides of this I think that that's kind of ridiculous I think that there's a pretty good chance that some people may confuse the iPad with the hi pad you know but on the other hand I do think overall that a lot of this stuff has gotten ridiculous one example of this is what's going on between Apple and Samsung so a little while back Apple sued Samsung they sued back over all kinds of things but one of the biggest things the bet came out of all this was Apple's lawsuit against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 as you guys can see here it does look fairly similar to the iPad however I wouldn't say it's perhaps a blatant ripoff but overall Apple was definitely not very happy with this so they sued is a big bunch of talking and this and that but the end result was that they actually got banned in Germany so you know as far as the Samsung Galaxy Tab nope you can't buy the 10.1 in Germany at all it's banned now of course this really is not acceptable all the Samsung when you design a tablet or phone it cost you millions millions of dollars and you expect to be able to you know sell it here and here and here and except etc so what they did was they create a different version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab called the 10.1 in now this is pretty much for all intents and purposes the same as the 10.1 over they tweaked the design some of the complaints to Apple had as far as you know like the look of it and whatnot they tweaked the design perfectly fine now it's on sale in Germany the thing is with this kind of stuff though is that that costs a lot of money to retool now what you might think yes the same tablets just got a little bit of a different design that costs millions and millions of dollars you know I do they have to make new advertising and all that kind of stuff but they have to retool so you got to keep in mind that you know all the cases and you know the designs whatnot all that kinda stuff has to be retool which is just astronomically expensive so that was really really a major expense for Samsung they had to redesign even if it was fairly minor they had to redesign their tablet just to be able to have it on sale of course it goes the other way too just this morning the European Union launched an antitrust investigation against Samsung for them suing all kinds of other manufacturers over 3G patents now of course there is 3G technology and pretty much every single phone that you buy today even 4G phones typically will have some kind of 3G radio inside so that can communicate with older networks now Samsung definitely does hold a lot of patents in this area however the main issue there is that they daren't release licensing them fairly or at least they're supposedly not licensing them fairly if you guys don't know what licensing patents is all about for the most part they can design something so let's say I design a multi-touch screen and that's mine I designed it and let's say Apple says hey I want to use your design well I can go sure you can use it you can use my neck technology however I designed it the only thing is you need to pay me like 50 cents for every iPhone and of course you know the terms a lot kind of stuff can vary wildly but licensing patents is very very common as far as this goes there's a lot of gray areas some patents that are out are a little bit broad and we have invented a new technology called multi-touch and boy have we patented it oh you know this just multi-touch on the Samsung Focus flash and the year 2012 no big deal so just take for example Android yeah I'm sure as most of you guys know it's a free and open-source operating system so today if I decide that I want to make a phone I can go to the Android website I can download Android and I can use it freely on any phone tablet or pretty much whatever else I want however it's not quite that simple many Android manufacturers today actually pay royalties to Microsoft for the sale of every single Android phone so the way this works is there's some kind of licensing agreement that there's some patents that Microsoft owns that are in Android and so to do it they pay for anything from 5 to 15 dollars for every Android phone sold now this is kind of where it comes back to you guys now whenever someone who signs a phone or a tablet they pretty much you've got to work out what's gonna cost what and etc etc so for example they'll dedicate so much money to the screen and they'll dedicate to the processor to the memory to you know someone designing the phone so they're usually there's gonna be some kind of designs to you involved there's a lot of different things that are involved now on top of all this just the hardware and the software I want not now you've got things like ok well now we have to pay also Microsoft ten dollars per phone for this or maybe we have to pay three or four dollars for our legal fees for these lawsuits here and here and here and while they're probably not going to make a $200 phone turn into a two hundred and twelve dollar phone what they may do is actually cut some kind of features so for example a phone they might decide okay it's gonna have 32 gigabytes of storage oh wait now we have to pay this much for legal fees in this much for licensing fees okay we know what let's just go ahead and give it 16 gigabytes of storage same thing goes and maybe a Super AMOLED to supply they're like oh that's too expensive we need to go down to an LCD display now overall it's really really complicated now don't get me wrong I definitely support patents and copyright and all that kind of stuff for example if I decide that I'm gonna design a phone right now and then someone else copies it entirely I should be able to sue them I mean that's just right they stole it but on the other hand there are definitely some patents and some definitely some things that are kind of overly broad and kind of a little bit silly that I think all it does is really just hurt you as a consumer that you're going to get maybe a a bit of a less quality phone this and that so I want to know what do you guys think about this whole mess nothing be sure to leave your thoughts in the comment section below I'm very curious to know I think there's a lot to be said on this issue and of course if you found this video informational helpful whatnot just be sure to leave it a thumbs up I really appreciate that and if you're interested in more videos on all kinds of Technology rants you know you name it that would be sure to subscribe to the channel up there