How Does Apple Want Everyone Else Building Smartphones?

If you've been following the work of Apple's legal department, you'd know the company is out with a vengeance to stop companies which it sees as ripping-off the design elements that Apple considers as defining the iPhone and iPad look. Samsung's been feeling the brunt of this assault, going so far as to redesign products to try avoiding Apple's wrath. Just what kind of products would Apple like to see everyone else building? Some details revealed in legal documents prepared by Apple give us a sense of the awful, ugly hardware it would prefer to be competing against.

These design elements come from a list of suggestions Apple prepared, offering Samsung ideas that wouldn't violate Apple's design. Not all of them sound like awful ideas, like a front screen with no bezel, but they're largely laughable. Technically, some supposedly only concern tablet design, but they still speak to Apple's belief that it owns the rights to hardware looking like this.

This is just a portion of all the ideas Apple put forward, iterating design steps that a company should take to avoid copying Apple's look:

● The front of device shouldn't be black
● If the basic design is a rectangle: no curved corners
● An off-center screen
● No horizontal speaker slots
● A front design that's cluttered/features excess adornments
● A device that's not thin

What do you think, is Apple taking reasonable steps to protect its intellectual property, or does it really think it should be the only one making smartphones as we know them today?

Source: The Verge