Apple closing in on Nokia’s as top smartphone maker

By George Wong on 05/06/2011, filed in Home > Apple

Apple closing in on Nokias as top smartphone maker

Despite all the hate (and love) for the iPhone, you gotta admit one thing – it sells. And it sells very well. According to a recent report released by the IDC, it looks like Apple is closing the gap between them and the number one smartphone manufacturer in the world, Nokia. The Cupertino-based company has overtaken RIM (pioneers of the smartphone) to take the runner up position behind the Finnish giants.

The entire smartphone market grew 79.7% this year and believe it or not, a large number of those phones sold were the Apple iPhone. While Apple only grew a meager 3% from their market share last year in the same time period, Nokia managed to lose 14.4% despite shipping more phones than they did a year ago. Now Apple is only 6 million units behind Nokia to claim the number one position for smartphone market share domination.

It’s hard to believe a company that entered the mobile phone scene only several years ago is on the way to overtake a company that’s been in the business for a much longer time. But then again, in the world of modern technology, anything can happen. Let’s see if Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft can pull them out of their sinking ship, or a hopeless cause.

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

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.

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.

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.

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