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Watch Out. Samsung Could Soon Become The Apple Inc. Of Your Nightmares

This article is more than 7 years old.

Today is an important day for Samsung. Ever since being sued by Apple in 2011 for duplicating its technology and design for its flagship galaxy smartphones, the South Korean tech mogul had been engaged in a tedious legal conflict that forced it to compensate $548 million in damages to Apple Inc. for infringing on its technology for the iPhone. In a rare and unusual occasion, the patent claim was recently analyzed by the Supreme Court of the United States, which returned a unanimous verdict this Tuesday saying Samsung didn't owe the entire sum of $548 million to Apple for the infringement claim. According to the court's verdict, Samsung didn't owe Apple the entire sum of profits incurred from the sale of the infringed product, but only a sum corresponding to the specific areas that had been copied. To dumb it down to simpler terms, Samsung only owes Apple as much money as it could have made from copying a few specific designs from the iPhone's model. The hearing wasn't a complete loss for Apple, however, as the Supreme Court has now referred the patent claim to be analyzed in a lower court of justice.

Samsung may have won one battle, but it is far from winning the war. In the last ten years, the South Korean company worked tooth-and-nail to establish itself as a high-end purveyor of smartphone technology. However, look back a couple years, and you shall see that the company barely retains the same amount of trust or brand value that it used to commandeer in its glory years. Samsung has oft resorted to drawing from the tactics of other successful companies like Apple, in both design and marketing aspects, despite still representing the forefront in innovation technology. However, its attempts have failed repeatedly thanks to one setback after another, including overpriced products, issues with hardware and software quality and lack of effective marketing. After Apple's iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy series is arguably the costliest range of smartphones in the market, despite the fact that it is yet to prove a worthy match for Apple's flagship. From overheated batteries to untimely crashes and severe lag issues, the Galaxy smartphones have been faced with multiple dilemmas. It does not help the situation that the Galaxy Note 7, the latest in Samsung's range of smartphones, has just been abandoned from production following a series of unexplained explosions. And all this is happening right after Apple officially released the new iPhone 7.

After receiving a few reports of exploding Galaxy Note 7s in August, Samsung temporarily called back its iconic new gadget and conducted vigorous testing to try and determine the cause of the blasts. When the tests failed, the company concluded that the explosions were the result of a faulty battery from one of its suppliers and the device was returned to the market. However, as soon as the product resurfaced in the market, so did a windfall of more exploding devices all around the world. In October, Samsung decided to finally pull the plug on its defective range of smartphones, a move that was alternatively called both courageous and foolish. While the product's abandonment may have just saved Samsung from an unwarranted disaster, it still could not mitigate the amount of loss the company suffered in terms of trust and brand value, monetary expenses notwithstanding. Further, this was hardly the extent of the problem as the safety of several of the brand's other appliances has now been called into question, and similar reports of exploding washing machines and overheating home gadgets have resulted in some serious bad press.

Over the span of the last few years, Samsung seemed to have left the big games and resorted to toeing the lines of other successful companies in an attempt to regain success. Its prices have gone up by a twofold, while quality deteriorations have become plain to see. In an attempt to topple giants like Apple and Google in terms of marketability, Samsung has simply loaded its devices up with so many features and innovations that they have grown unstable. While Samsung devices are still one of the very first to bring the latest of innovations into the market, the depreciation in product quality is a concern not easy to overlook. While I would like nothing more than to see this once glorious brand of technology regain its position at the top, Samsung sure has a long way to go before it can expect to regain the trust that it has so easily lost in the last few years.

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