Samsung is accused regularly of copying various aspects of Apple products, from their designs and aesthetic to various patented technologies contained within them. Sometimes, the allegations are founded — Samsung once created a secret 132-page guide to help engineers copy Apple’s iPhone interface — and a judge recently awarded Apple nearly $1 billion when it sued Samsung for stealing its intellectual property. Plenty of the ripoff accusations are unfounded of course, but this time around it looks like Samsung has taken yet another page out of Apple’s playbook.
The image above, posted to Twitter on Thursday by SamMobile, shows what the blog claims to be Samsung’s redesigned S Voice application. S Voice, for those unfamiliar with it, is the voice assistant that Samsung launched following Apple’s introduction of Siri. It doesn’t work quite as well in all cases — we detailed how frustrating it is to use on the Galaxy Gear in our review last October — but it is certainly handy sometimes.
Interestingly, the first thing you’ll notice about Samsung’s new S Voice design is that it’s much “flatter.” Flatter… flatter… where have we heard that descriptor before?
Samsung’s new S Voice design, which may debut in the coming months alongside the launch of the highly anticipated flagship Galaxy S5, essentially looks like iOS 7 without the translucent layering effect Apple uses in its software. Samsung’s much-rumored new Android user interface borrows from a number of different software platforms though, not just iOS 7.
From the look of recent leaks, however, the end result is gorgeous. Software makers borrow things from each other all the time — the Notification Center (Android ripoff) and app switcher (webOS ripoff) in iOS 7 sure do look familiar — so Samsung’s new UI just keeps with that common theme.
