Apple logos in backdrop for Samsung in-store display

Makes you wonder if there's also Motorola and HTC logos hidden by the display...

Without a fantastic investigative journalism budget that would allow me to fly to the Italian store in question on the company jet on a moment's notice, I'm left to assume one of three things has happened here:

1. The display was left over from another mobile promotion and only truly nitpicky geeks like us and the folks at All Things D would ever dream of making an issue about a few little icons that only the aforementioned geeks would ever recognize anyway.

2. Samsung has a terribly backward understanding of the meaning of the term "product placement."

3. Samsung is stalking Apple. It has Korean factories making nothing but black turtlenecks and jeans. It also has that Safari icon tattooed on its buttocks. And sometimes it just slips up.

You can decide for yourself what the most likely explanation is, but Samsung doesn't have a great track record here. Back in 2008 it let it slip that a version of Safari was going to be coming to one of its old-school Symbian phones. Turns out they meant "s60 safari," which is a different browser based on some of the same components as Apple's browser, but it still belies the company's apparent ignorance of the concept of a trademark.

Well, at least one mystery may have been solved here. Perhaps we now know what became of the errant promotional backdrops for those s60 safari phones.