Originally posted by reeftool I'm certainly not anti-Apple. My first computer was an Apple 2e which I still have around the house somewhere. I strayed away because of the locked down system they have. I can build my PC, configure it as I please. One hard drive or as many as will fit in the case if I please. I can choose mother boards, graphics cards, DVD drives to suit my needs. Android phones are a lot more open. All my music on my PC just loads on to the SD card in the phone. I treat it like a jump drive. I'm not locked into ITunes. I buy my products based on the way they work, not on how pretty they look.
Apple has a right to defend it's patents. We all have our opinions but none of us sat in that courtroom for weeks and went through all the evidence. The big issue the courts will be deciding on appeal is whether the patents should have been issued to begin with. I think that is the direction Samsung is going with their appeal.
While some people might question the mentality of polls about a phone that hasn't been released yet, all the chatter and polls and opinions going on in other threads of the forum about the next Pentax camera and lenses is probably just as odd.
Nobody needs to defend a personal decision of that type, but for some reason many people seem to be easily polarised on who or what is better, and feel the need to belittle other people's decisions when they don't conform to that view. I'm not saying you or anyone else in particular is doing that here, but it was the creation of a poll on the appearance of an unknown product, and then directing the result at the manufacturer in a derogatory way that really got to me. That's shallow in the extreme, and a very long way from speculating about something, or creating a wishlist, as people here have done, in relation to Pentax products.
It's a well-established technique, though, and it's called the "Straw Man" technique. You build up a model of your enemy, cast from your own prejudices, and proceed to destroy it, even though it may bear no resemblance to the real thing. That's what was done by the writer of that article referenced by the OP.