Can an Android shake a red-faced Apple and turn it green with envy?!

You can't turn on the TV in 2014 without hearing about one war or another, which is a truly depressing state of affairs, so it comes as total light relief in comparison to hear of another war that has continued to simmer on and which just boiled over again - the smartphone war! Now that Apple has decided to bite the bullet and face the screen size issue, we are off once again into hilarious digs from the Android Nation - with Samsung in particular leading the charge via its series of brutal "It doesn't take a genius" videos.  

This is but one out of a series of six different ads all poking fun at the supposedly novel features of Apple's new offering, including the purported real purpose of the Apple Watch as a distraction from the actual phone devices themselves. Depending on whether you're an Apple (particularly a green apple!) or an Android, these ads come across as either truly annoying or comically brilliant, but in any case they show the great divide that does exist between the Droid Nation and the Apple Army. 

This divide is far from just a consumer-based rivalry and is most definitely not mere fun for the corporations involved - Apple vs Samsung is perhaps the most bitter, litigious and expensive war ever waged between two giants of the business world, never mind just the technology world. It all began in the summer of 2010 during the reign of Steve Jobs when Apple first claimed that Samsung's pioneering flagship device, the Galaxy S, was a rip-off of the iPhone. To cut a long story short, it has been going on ever since, involving millions of pages of legal documents and an even more staggering billion dollars plus in legal costs. As is often the case in such matters, the lawyers are the ones who probably enjoy the smartphone war(s) the most!

To say that the Koreans did not exactly agree would be putting it mildly, not least given that they were supplying (up until the most recent iPhone model) various key components of the Apple device, including that shiny retina screen. Further, Samsung responded by stating that they believed that Apple may have infringed on their patents used in previous Samsung mobile devices; the brand had been in the mobile phone business for almost two decades by the time the iPhone arrived (very glamorously) onto the scene.

Unquestionably, Steve Jobs and Apple got so much right in their flagship iPhone and things changed forever once iPhone fever kicked in, globally. At one point it looked like Apple was always going to be ahead, until one glaring oversight that became more and more apparent from Apple iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy SII, and models beyond - screen size. This is where the two brands began to diverge and the devices began to feel and look truly dissimilar. For me personally, I began to feel that iPhones were simply too small for a man's hand, but they made extremely elegant phones for females. Conversely, Galaxy (and other Android) devices just got bigger and bigger, and the thinking that large tablet-like devices would not sell were put very firmly to bed by Samsung in particular and the Android Nation in general.

Samsung have not been slow to mock Apple for this oversight, one made by the great Steve Jobs himself, and they recently resurrected his own words as part and parcel of their response to Apple's (apparently self-indulgent) ads that suggest that the "bigger-is-better" philosophy is news to anyone except maybe Tim Cook. Naturally, the Apple Army have risen in numbers claiming that quoting Steve Jobs today is tasteless in the extreme, when sadly, the man is no longer able to respond. But you can't blame Samsung for also pointing out that they have had a smartwatch around for ages already, so what's the big deal about that? Essentially, everything that Apple is chest-beating and preening itself over has been available to the Android Nation for years already!

I (for one) knew that the statement above derived from an erroneous philosophy, not least because the very day I moved from Apple iPhone 3G to Samsung Galaxy SII - I was lost to the Apple Army. In one day, I knew I was never going back. Each time I handled a new Samsung phone, iPhones just seemed to get smaller and smaller, to the point where I would never buy one again - even if it was free with the contract! The incredibly successful (yet unwieldy, according to critics) Samsung Galaxy Note series proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Samsung was right, and Apple got it wrong - there's a huge market for so-called "huge" devices (phablets) and an incredibly loyal fan base who gobble up each new model with increasingly ravenous hunger. 

Bringing up that comment from Steve Jobs will hardly do anything to his legacy, I am certain - it's written deeply in stone, and his genius will live on with us (and maybe beyond us) for a very long time. I actually think that it's Tim Cook whose vision will be examined; it's no surprise that he had to go along with Jobs while he was the boss, but deciding subsequently to go with bigger devices is hardly visionary especially given that the market demand for those "unwieldy" devices was eating an increasingly larger bite out of the right side of that apple! So what is Cook bringing to the table that is new - that's the question being raised by Samsung, the Android Nation, some Apple die-hards, and maybe even the Apple board.

For us consumers, I think the smartphone war is all incredibly entertaining and it should not be taken too seriously. If the ongoing battle between the Android Nation and the Apple Army produces beautiful yet amazingly functional devices at killer prices, then it's all alright by me - bring it on, people!