A German court has upheld the preliminary injunction prohibiting Samsung from selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in Germany. Apple won the injunction against Samsung last month as part of a lawsuit that claims the Tab 10.1 is designed to be little more than an iPad clone. Samsung disagrees, and the courts haven’t actually ruled on the larger issue yet — but the preliminary injunction is keeping Samsung from selling its tablet until there’s a ruling on the full case.
Some folks are reporting that today’s ruling means there’s a “permanent ban” on the tablet in Germany. That’s not necessarily true.
Samsung can still appeal to a higher court, and Samsung could still win when the case comes to trial. But at this point, Samsung has lost its appeal at the current court level which means that if you’re living in Germany you still can’t buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The injunction has been in effect for exactly a month so far.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 features a 10.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display, a 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processor, and runs Google Android 3.2 Honeycomb with Samsung’s TouchWiz software modifications. It weighs about 1.25 pounds and measures about a third of an inch thick. At a glance, it does bear a resemblance to the Apple iPad 2, which is also very thin and light, but Apple’s tablet has a different operating system (which some folks might claim is similar), a slightly smaller screen with a lower pixel resolution and a 4:3 aspect ratio instead of 16:9, and a different chipset.
But it’s up to the courts to decide if the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is an iPad knockoff or not, and that decision hasn’t yet been made.
apple is horrible!