The Verdict is out and Samsung took a major hit, for $1Billion and that could triple in Damages. The verdict didn’t take too long at all, the lawyers have been bickering for months on every little detail but Apple pulled the final punches and sealed the deal for Samsung. Lets not kid ourselves Samsung did copy a bit, but not so much that they would damage iPhone’s profit, and I think they should have paid some licensing fees, but $1Billion is a bit over the top in this case. But in reality Samsung has been the only major competitor against Apple and they have improved because of that, they may have copied a few designs initially but Samsung has developed its own line which has taken off and they are still a major contender in the market.

Apple is even looking to ban the sale of several of Samsung’s products in the US, The Verge.

This will have a bit of a slow down for some companies since a lot of companies (HTC, Google, Motorola, LG, …) are in court battles with Apple over different and similar patent issues. Some cases they will win and some they will lose, but I still think that Apple does see Android as a threat but they are more then confident of their product and I can’t blame them. Still I think that Android has reached a point where it is on par with Apple even with its defects, and Apple does have its own issues, but lets see where this verdict will take us next.

But you can’t get to the long run without paying attention to the short run. Samsung’s decision to ape Apple wasn’t the most graceful strategy in tech history. But faced with an emergency—a “crisis of design”—copying was the best Samsung could do. And it paid off handsomely.

This article in Pandodaily puts things in perspective, at how things developed in the telecom industry and how the major providers have changed drastically since 2007 and what might take place in the near future. Everyone remembers the battle between Nokia & Sony-Ericsson for supremacy, and those days have gone by so quickly, with different players at the table and Apple at the head.