RIM More Popular Than Apple

on 05/05/2009, filed in Home > Apple

Research In Motion (RIM) goes one up on Apple and its iPhone by being the most popular smartphone manufacturer during Q1 2009. The three-month period that ended in March saw RIM’s consumer smartphone market share increase by 15% to touch nearly 50% of the smartphone market compared to the previous quarter – at least that’s what statistics from market research firm NPD showed. This effort was more than enough to topple Apple form their top position, where both Apple and Palm saw their market share decline by about 10%. It would be interesting to see how all the companies fare in the coming quarter with the Palm Pre and rumored new iPhone model round the corner.

Android: Android is the mobile operating system from Google. The software was originally built by a company called Android Inc, that was purchased by Google in 2005. From its modest debuts, Android has become a powerhouse that powers not only smartphones and tablet, but a host of other less high-profile devices and gadgets. Although Android is not a community-driven project, Google does release the source code as open-source under the Apache license. You can follow Ubergizmo on Android with Google Currents.

Apple Inc: Apple Inc was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne as a computer company wich is often credited to have initiated personal computing. After a meteoric rise in the 80s, Apple had lost the personal computing battle against Microsoft and others in the 90s. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, the company came back to profitability by focusing on less products and started using industry-standard components. Apple's largest business is now in the smartphone space, with the iPhone representing more than half of the revenues and an even larger part of the profits. Read our Apple product reviews to see what the company has been up to: iPhone 5 Review, Macbook Pro with Retina display review

iPhone: iPhone: The iPhone is Apple's line of smartphones. That was also the original name of the first iPhone, which was announced on January 9th 2007 by Steve Jobs during the Macworld Keynote. The iPhone was released to the public in June of the same year. The development of the iPhone started in 2004, was internally called "project purple" and was the fruit of a collaboration between Apple and AT&T. Since then, Apple has released new iPhone models every year, with the iPhone 3G in July 2008, the iPhone 3GS in June 2009, the iPhone 4 in June 2010, the iPhone 4S in October 2011 and the iPhone 5 in September 2012. The iPhone represented more than half of Apple's revenues in 2012.

RIM: RIM is the acronym for Research In Motion, the Canadian company behind the BlackBerry brand. RIM was founded in the mid 90s by Mike Lazaridis and with Jim Balsillie and went IPO (Initial Public Offering) in 1998. Its claim to fame was to make mobile email really effective and enterprises quickly adopted its devices and associated software and services which were highly lucrative. With the rise of iOS and Android devices, the BlackBerry franchise bumped into trouble and its decline prompted RIM to take a radical step by overhauling its BlackBerry operating system (OS) completely with QNX. The first version of the QNX BlackBerry OS is BlackBerry 10 or BB10.

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