Symbian remains top, Android closing in

on 02/23/2010, filed in Home > CellPhones

Research and advisory company Gartner recently rolled out its worldwide cellphone sales report for the past year, where the smartphone category was the fastest growing one, seling 53.8 million units in the last quarter, with Symbian remaining at the top with its 46.9% of market share while RIM hit 19.9% from 16.6%. The iPhone OS nearly doubled its market share though at 14.4%, while Android made significant gains to touch 3.9% from just 0.5% the year before. Windows Mobile is a big loser, stooping to 8.7% from 11.8%. Perhaps Microsoft’s fortunes will change with the introduction of Windows Phone 7.

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.

iOS: was once upon a time called iPhone OS, or "operating system", which is the software that provides all the basic device functionality and is the interface between the hardware and applications. iOS was introduced with the iPhone on January 9 2007, and it was originally not intended to be programmable by third parties. Steve Jobs had envisioned that developers could create Web Apps that would run in the browser. This changed less than one year after when the iPhone SDK (software development kit) was introduced in October 2007. Today, hundreds of thousands of apps have been created for this platform. iPhone OS became iOS on June 2010. Interestingly, both iPhone and iOS were former trademarks of Cisco, that Apple now uses under a license.

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