Apple lost in a German court in one of the cases related to a competitor's product that vaguely resembles the appearance of an Apple gadget. In this case, Apple's lawyers insisted on the similarities between Apple's iPad and Motorola's Xoom.
Now Cupertinians will not be able to ban the sale of the Xoom tablet in Europe, as previously planned. Recall that the company presented the Xoom tablet running Android 3.0 Honeycomb at CES back in January 2011. In the first quarter of 2012, sales of the device were only 100 thousand units. As you can see, Motorola Xoom did not make any special impression on the target audience.
The judge reportedly didn't see any similarities between the iPads and the Xoom, which was enough to turn Apple down. Motorola also filed a lawsuit to invalidate the iPad design patent, but the court also rejected it.
The court ordered Apple to pay two-thirds of the legal costs, one-third will be withheld from Motorola.
In fact, there are many possible design options for tablets that competitors could take advantage of when creating popular devices. The only argument from Apple's lawyers that Motorola simply copied the iPad design, I think, seemed strange to many.
The truth is that Apple's lawyers were not too lazy to file a complaint against the Xoom, once again proves how seriously the company's management takes the iPad share in the tablet market, and how far the company is ready to go to prevent business rivals in this particular segment of the mobile market.
And it looks like this strategy still works. At least the old model of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet until now "comes across" a ban on sales in the United States.
