The two-billion dollar patent infringement suit involving two domineering mobile brands has gotten even more interesting with another company joining in the fray.
Samsung Electronics Co. presented one of its seven witnesses from Google Inc. in its defense against Apple Inc.'s accusation that the former infringed some of iPhone's features and used it on Android for the Samsung Galaxy devices.
Hiroshi Lockheimer, VP of the Android engineering department, appeared Friday before the court in San Jose, Calif., and dispelled Apple's accusation against Samsung.
Google got embroiled in the case because it was the one that supplied some features that are being argued about in court for Samsung's Android-powered devices. The defense team of Samsung called Lockheimer to demonstrate that Android was on its way to development before iPhone's introduction to the market in January 2007 and that it was Google that designed many of the argued-about features for Android first.
His opening testimony is said to have strengthened Samsung's argument that Google didn't copy the patents of Apple and extend these patents to Samsung.
"We liked to have our own identity; we liked to have our own ideas," Lockheimer said, adding that they were "very passionate" about their work and noting the importance of having their own ideas.
His testimony then contradicted the earlier statements from witnesses of Apple narrating the story of iPhone's development and release, one of which came from Philip W. Schiller, VP of worldwide marketing for Apple.
"I was shocked it appeared that Samsung was going to be doing a lot of copying of our products," Schiller said.
Apple had two other witnesses in court last week: Christopher Vellturo and John Hauser. Vellturo is principal and economist at Quantitative Economic Solutions consultancy, while Hauser is a marketing professor at MIT.
Vellturo said Samsung owes Apple $2.19 billion in damages for patent infringement, an amount he came up with by evaluating several factors such as time span and scale of infringement. Hauser, on the other hand, claimed that Samsung's devices became more appealing by the patented features of Apple and without those features, fewer consumers would have bought the devices.
In defense, Lockheimer recalled joining the company in 2006 and said that Android was already in the process of development at the time. Android was an independent company that Google obtained in 2005. He said that the company planned to add features to Android not present in the iPhone, citing an example such as the capability to run several apps at the same time. He also said that Google intended to provide a software system that manufacturers could freely install on their mobile devices.
When asked by attorney John Quinn of the defense team of Samsung if his team could have copied anything from iPhone, Lockheimer denied being aware of anything.
Interestingly, an Android Project Software Functional Requirements Document, an internal document of Google, came out in the trial, which showed what Android had in mind in 2006 before the introduction of iPhone.
"Touchscreens will not be supported: the Product was designed with the presence of discrete physical buttons as an assumption. However, there is nothing fundamental in the Product's architecture that prevents the support of touchscreens in the future," the document says.
The document also states that the operating system of Android will be based on Linux 2.6 for ARM. Other staple features such as third-party support, key lock and widgets were also in the document.
Research says Google executives Cary Clark and Dianne Hackborn will also be summoned in court to testify against Apple.
