Excellent point - Samsung looked at the iPhone design as the definitive source, rather than deconstructing use cases or consumer needs.

Even the icons and color themes are the same on many screens. That by itself shows that Samsung copied Apple in prior product reviews as well. Kinda funny that they still had so many design discrepancies...

Yes, that's a good way to put it. And a "good" competitive analysis would also analyze Apple's weaknesses, and seek to exploit them. (e.g. turn-by-turn nav, google mail integration, better multitasking, whatever)

Not if your product is lagging so clearly on ridiculously basic stuff that you get a far better ROI on just fixing the glaringly obvious deficiencies you have compared to the market leader.

Sometimes the competition does it just right and you have to make it "more similar". Many times in this case.

Sometimes the competition does it better but not necessarily the only right way, for example the email indicator on slide 20. In that case the directive suggests another way of improving the interface.

Whoever wrote this document did not want the devices to be too similar:

Strong impression that iPhone's icon concept was copied. Directions for improvement: Remove a feeling that iPhone's menu icons are copied by differentiating design. (last slide)

Wish they did that before putting the phone on the market...

But in this case for feature after feature the reason it makes the devices much more similar was that at that stage the iPhone UI decisions made obvious sense. There's a lot of stuff along the order of "we've tucked stuff off in the border somewhere in a color that blends in, but we need to make it bright and put it in a noticeable position" where the iPhone was a good example of UI done right but where the same overall direction could be had by looking at any number of other products (and not just phones either).

I've not read the whole thing, but I've not seen any clear examples where they've had lots of choice in how to make things better without making things more similar to the iPhone. Now that's an impressive testament to the quality of Apple's UI design, but most of it is "obvious" - the problem isn't that it's hard to figure out that you'd like a "previous" button to go with a "next" button, but that it takes a lot of attention to detail to get this level of consistent quality throughout the product.

And Apple does that well, and Samsung at that stage clearly had not done all that great.

If Samsung had put in that attention to detail, the devices would likely have been a lot more similar from the outset.

If I understand correctly, this is a report - for me, it's natural that it would include product recommendations as well as criticism. Whether the company follows up on those recommendations or not, is an orthogonal issue.