CFultz's Blog

What seems to be the beginning of a smartphone war has actually been going on for quite sometime now. The reasons why everyone is taking sides for their team are being pushed on the consuming public via the web, TV commercials, and newspaper ads. The two sides are iPhone versus Android, or is it just two sides? Let’s delve into the market just a tad deeper, say about 20 years back.

The year is 1992 when Big Blue (IBM) decided to jump into a new market, smart cellular phones. IBM released a prototype dubbed Simon for a technology trade show in Nevada. Within a years time the consumer market had their hands on it. With no physical keypad in site, Simon was equipped with a smart touch keyboard, touch screen, world clock, calender, email, and faxing capabilities. Now today this may seem like a low-end piece of hardware, in ’92 Simon was the best thing on Earth!

After seeing IBM’s great success, Nokia decided it was time to jump into the battle. With the Communicator series of phones starting to emerge in ’96, Nokia started firing back at IBM and Simon. The Nokia 9000 was Nokia’s first smartphone that combined a HP PDA making it a strong starting device. Shortly there after, the 9210 series was released and was the first “true” smartphone because it had a color display and ran a smartphone OS. Then the 9500 came out which was Nokia’s first smart camera phone and also featured the ability to connect to wifi networks.

Then in 2001, Handspring unveiled the Palm OS Treo smartphone, featuring a full keyboard and combined wireless web browsing, email, calendar and contact organizer. As well, the Treo was the first smartphone to feature mobile third-party applications that could be downloaded then synced with a computer at a later time. Then in less than a year, RIM produced a new type of smartphone, the Blackberry. Blackberry’s were the first smartphone made for wireless email use and has gained a total customer base of 8 million subscribers by June 2007, most from North America. In 2002, Handspring was marketing the integrated smartphone called Treo; the company decided to merge with Palm because the PDA market was dying but the Treo was quickly becoming popular as a phone with that emulated a PDA.

Fast forward to June 29, 2007, the birth of a new era, the iPhone for Apple and AT&T. Released at 6 PM, the iPhone had thousands of people standing in line at Apple stores waiting to get their hands on it. Featuring a 320×480 pixel touch screen, Safari Web browser, geotagging 2MP camera, Google Maps, Youtube, and an iPod, the iPhone was set to be the “phone killer”. Now with two more generations under their belt, Apple has upped the camera to 3MP and added video recording features for the 3GS. What made the iPhone so great was the App Store, a centralized location where people could download apps, games, utilities all without a computer! The major flaw with the iPhone was the lack of multimedia messaging at launch. This was later fixed on September 25, 2009 after AT&T “fixed” their network to support the mass inflation of picture messages. Still, the iPhone is said to be the most modified phone to date. Using custom firmwares to achieve features “blocked” by Apple, hackers and modders can make their phones unique from their friends and others.

In the past months, Google released an OS for smartphones known as Android. Android is dubbed “the iPhone killer” because of Google’s belief in Open Source Technology. Taking the idea from Apple, Android (as well as others) has an “App Store” known as Android Marketplace where users can buy and sell or just download for free applications and games. Having Google as it’s parent, the Android has all it’s major functions through Google including GPS navigation through Google Maps, Youtube, music player, email, and a lite version of Google Chrome Web Browser. Android phones are available through Verizon and T-Mobile.

Now that all the facts of been presented to you, you now know that there is more than two sides to this war or is there? If you ask and iPhone user who the biggest smartphone competitor is, chances are you’ll hear “Google Android”. If you ask anyone else who is the major competitor for their phone is, you’ll more than likely hear “the iPhone”. Why is this? Is the iPhone such a big hitter in the market that other’s fear it’s “superior” features? Only time can tell which phone will become the top used smartphone in the world but who knows if it will iPhone, Android, or something far more advanced and visibly more beautiful.

Posted in: Android, Smartphone, iPhone, mobile by Caleb Fultz / Tags: Android, blackberry, iPhone, phone, treo