When Apple unveiled its new iPhone last month – you remember, when the Internet went into a collective paroxysm, speaking in tongues and falling into ecstatic prostration at Steve Jobs feet – many of us observers said, “hey, wait a minute. Didn’t LG just win a prize for a phone just like that?”
Though LG was quite silent during all the iPhone madness (though we tried and tried to get them to talk to us), the company went ahead and released the specs on its new Prada-branded phone due for launch in Europe and Asia this year. But still they said nothing about the obvious similarities.
Well, according to a Korean website, LG has finally spoken up, in broken English. At a press conference in Spain, head of LG’s Mobile Handset R&D Center, Woo-Young Kwak (no relation to Long Duk Dong) expressed what appears to be displeasure, perhaps even an allegation:
“We consider that Apple copycat Prada phone after the design was unveiled when it was presented in the iF Design Award and won the prize in September 2006.”
We take that to mean ‘Apple stole our idea.’
But, for the skeptic, isn’t four months a little short for industrial espionage turnaround? Maybe not, but Apple says they’ve been working on the iPhone for a lot longer than that, filing 200 patents in the meantime.
It may be more realistic to imagine that Apple saw the pics of the LG phone floating around the Internet and decided to get a jump on them by launching iPhone a week ahead, which is a really smart move, and may actually explain why Apple revealed it six months ahead of time, before the FCC had even approved it.
Kwak should have just admitted, “Apple stole our thunder.”
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