Apple Surpasses RIM To Become Second Largest Mobile Device Maker

By Matthew Chung on 10/22/2010, filed in Home > Apple

As you undoubtedly already know, Apple’s iPhone has been an incredibly popular device since it was first introduced and now Strategy Analytics has come up with its latest report, listing Apple as the second largest smartphone company in the word, just behind Nokia. According to the stats, Apple had the largest increase in shipments and has surpassed RIM as the second largest smartphone seller. Such success is obviously related to Apple reaping the benefits of having good hardware, software, and a large application eco-system. If this keeps up, perhaps Apple will even overtake Nokia in the near future.

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

Nokia: Nokia is a Finnish communications company that was the largest phone vendor (per unit) between 1988 to 2012. The company's history go back to 1871 but the Nokia that we know today (the Nokia corporation) was founded in 1967 by the merger of three Finnish companies. It is then that Nokia worked on networking equipment and was ultimately involved in the launch of the first cellular network in 1981 (Mobira Oy). Nokia because a key developer of GSM, the standard that we all know today. Although Nokia still produces a range of phones that includes entry-level handsets and Symbian smartphones, the company is counting on the Windows Phone OS to regain the share that it once had. The current flagship Windows Phone device from Nokia is the Lumia 920.

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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