Attorney in Apple, Samsung Class Actions Won’t Rule Out Additional Targets
The lawyer who filed companion federal complaints Friday alleging Apple and Samsung are shortchanging the public on the screen-resolution specs on which they market their smartphones won’t rule out targeting additional manufacturers. “That depends on what comes to us,” attorney C.K. Lee told us Monday, when asked if he plans more lawsuits.
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The iPhone X, XS and XS Max smartphones lack their “advertised” screen resolutions and screen sizes in violation of consumer protection laws in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, alleged the complaint against Apple (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in San Jose (see 1812140042). Nearly three dozen models of Samsung smartphones dating to 2010 were marketed with “nominal” screen resolutions that “misleadingly count false pixels as if they were true pixels,” said the complaint against Samsung (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Both complaints seek class-action status. Apple and Samsung didn’t comment.
At issue is the Pentile subpixel-patterning technology that for years has inspired internet debate. Pentile typically uses an RGBG matrix array with twice as many green subpixels per pixel as red and blue subpixels. Compared with more conventional “real-stripe” RGB matrix displays, Pentile offers longer display life expectancies and better power efficiency, says Samsung, which bought the Pentile patents from Clairvoyante Labs in 2008. Samsung Display, which supplies the screens for Samsung and Apple smartphones, landed the Pentile trademark in July 2017 after Clairvoyante’s 10-year ownership term expired, Patent and Trademark Office records show.
But Samsung markets smartphones with Pentile screens “as possessing higher pixel resolution screens than they really have,” said the New York complaint, repeating language in the California lawsuit against Apple, which didn’t reference Pentile by name. Pentile screens “omit half of the red and half of the blue subpixels in a display,” said the allegations against Samsung. “Therefore, they have half of the advertised number of pixels and two thirds of the advertised number of subpixels.”
Lee and his law firm “have been investigating these two cases for, like, a year,” he told us. “It’s been a long time in the process.” The seven consumer plaintiffs named in the two complaints “came to us,” he said. “People come to us all the time.” Asked to quantify how much he and his clients would seek in class settlements with Apple and Samsung, Lee said: “Anytime you bring a case, you have to be ready to take it to trial. We’ve done at least 10 jury trials, and we’ve won all of them.”