Over the past two weeks, Apple triumphed as the Samsung Galaxy 10.1 ban was once more put into action, Samsung smartphones were banned in Europe by a Dutch court, and the Australian release of their tablet was furthermore delayed.  To add insult to injury, Apple has once more crushed Samsung’s dream of dominating the tablet industry as another one of their products was banned in Germany.

Samsung unveiled new products at the 2011 IFA which included the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, perceived to be the 10.1 replacement as the tablet has been hit with so many obstacles since it was launched.  Unfortunately, Samsung’s hope of making a tablet comeback with the GT 7.7 was crushed when a Dusseldorf court granted Apple’s injunction request last September 2.  This resulted to the GT 7.7 being pulled out from the largest trade show of the year.

“Samsung respects the court’s decision,” James Chung, a Seoul-based spokesman for Samsung said yesterday, adding that the company believes it “severely limits consumer choice in Germany.”

Samsung will exhaust all available options, including legal ones, to address the issue immediately.  If Apple continues to win these injunctions, Samsung may be forced to enter a licensing agreement with Apple, which will end all these patent infringement issues but will make their products cost more, further hurting sales.

Some are wondering why the 7.7 inch tablet was banned when it was quite different from the iPad.  First off, the sizes greatly differ: Samsung is at 7.7 while the iPad was at 9.7 inches.  And they used different screens and resolutions, as the Samsung tablet uses its own Super AMOLED Plus with 1280×800 (WXGA) while the iPad uses an LED display with a 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi).  Their dimensions also vary, obviously as the Apple tablet bigger and heavier.  They run on different OS platforms: Apple runs on iOS 5, Samsung with Android 3.2 or Honeycomb.  Samsung has a 1.4 GHz dual core processor while the iPad has the Apple A5 processor and a 1GHz dual-core processor.

These are just some of the dissimilarities between the two products which led me to question how the Samsung Galaxy Tab infringed the iPad, not to mention Apple doesn’t even refer to the iPad as a tablet, making Apple’s stance in the tablet wars even more elitist.  Where does Apple draw the line, and where should the line actually be drawn?

Lenovo’s director of consumer products and pricing Andrew Barrow stated that though Samsung declared they shipped over a million tablets since last year, only 20,000 of those were actually sold.  Analyst Rob Bamforth termed this as “channel stuffing” in which a company creates hype by false advertising in the hopes of increasing their sales.  Samsung hasn’t given any details regarding their actual tablet sales, which some may perceive as validation behind rumors of poor sales.  Samsung shares have since fallen by 4.9%, the biggest drop since August 18.