Patent trials generally aren’t the most exciting of events, but documents revealed through the second Apple vs Samsung case are certainly providing a lot of fascinating glimpses behind the scenes.

The latest is the above summary of research Apple carried out among early buyers of the iPhone 5 to find out what they thought of the phone and what improvements they wanted to see, tweeted by Jay Yarow. While longer battery-life and better maps will surprise no-one, it’s interesting that even at the beginning of last year, bigger screens was third on the list … 

With consistent reports that Apple plans both a 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch version of the iPhone 6 each with sapphire screens, and the reports now backed by internal slides from Apple revealed yesterday, we’ve been seeing a whole range of concept images, some more persuasive than others.

Another interesting snippet spotted by Yarow was that Apple’s senior VP of marketing Phil Schiller considered it “nuts” to pay for social media monitoring, observing that all the tools needed to do this area already “built right into the social networking sites, all free.”

The email was in response to senior director Arthur Rangel who referenced a Fortune article on Samsung in suggesting using a monitoring service offered by Networked Insights. The full exchange appears below.

It’s interesting because you might think that someone of Schiller’s seniority in a company as rich as Apple might be happy just to farm out the work to an external agency and get back the pretty slides, but Schiller commented that he did it himself, every day.