Oh, the ignominy. The sheer, utter humiliation. Samsung go to
court to prove their tablets aren’t a blatant rip-off of Apple’s
iPad, and what does the British judge say?  She'll be Apples…
though not quite Apples enough to get into trouble  The judge
says they win. He agrees that their products are not the same as
Apple’s. He says, and I quote: “They do not have the same
understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the
Apple design.”  And then he says, in what must have felt like a
belligerent, ungloved slap across Samsung’s corporate face:
“They are not as cool”.  Ouch. Poor old Samsung. In the techo
world, there is no greater insult that being called uncool. It’s
the ultimate putdown. It’s like when American Idol judge Simon
Cowell used to tell warbling contestants “you’d be lucky to sing
in the piano bar of a Holiday Inn”.  Apple has been playing the
cool card since 1984, when it famously showed us, with the aid
of an ‘80s chick in short shorts, that the year 1984 wouldn’t be
like George Orwell