Mobile Wars is a special experiment on chaaps where we discuss on topic Mobile Wars extensively, This Series of articles is authored by Siddhu
The mobile industry is heading in an odd direction today. It seems like just yesterday developers were actively developing Symbian when all of a sudden Nokia announced that Symbian will no longer be supported. The result was a sad developer community. Many of the Symbian developers did not know where to go. The mobile market is a shifting market after all.
This is a sequel series that’ll cover the details about the mobile industry, present standards and future standards. By the end of this sequel you should be able to tell the pros and cons of each and every mobile platform and even judge on whether the present standards will remain a standard or whether newer technologies will replace them.
History is often boring. You do not need to know the history of anything except something that’ll give you a better understanding of today’s technology. That’s what this post will aim at.
There’s a really long history about the mobile industry. But most notably there are three stories worth telling:
- Apple
- Research In Motion(RIM)
- Nokia
Apple:
In January 2007 Apple had announced that computers were no longer their prime focus. Instead, the focus was on what Steve Jobs referred to as the “Post-PC” period. Steve Jobs stated that the smaller devices were now capable of delivering the performance that computers one day used to deliver. He was right, he saw the future of the mobile industry before anyone else. Apple was known for its hardware that was always at top-notch. It wanted to bring the Apple quality outside PCs into the mobile world.
RIM
Research In Motion, a Canadian company, was beginning work on enterprise solutions. They could not make the top-notch hardware like Apple, but yet they could provide enterprise solutions in software extending it only to their hardware. The Blackberry Enterprise Server was thus born. This allowed all blackberry devices to push and pull email quickly from the company’s mail servers. This was fairly new technology to the mobile industry and only RIM mastered it at the moment. Companies and organisations immediately adopted the Blackberry Enterprise Server as a standard as it was not only blazing fast but also secure and ran in compliance with office mail servers.
Nokia
Nokia, primarily a handset manufacturer, was the first company to produce high quality low priced devices in the market. This let them gain market share easily. To improve Nokia products further, it joined forces with a few other companies to form Symbian – the mobile Operating System that had a majority of the market share till 2011. By deploying Symbian on their phones, Nokia rose high among the ranks and competed with the big companies such as Apple and RIM.
It should be clear why Apple, RIM and Nokia have a leading role in the mobile industry. Its because they’ve specialized in either the hardware or software or maybe even both. Or maybe its just because they were early in the game. Whatever be it the case, what’s really important to grasp from this article is the fact that just these three companies have been dominating the mobile market for quite a while.
In the next post in this sequel I’ll give a brief introduction to the problems related to hardware and software and even introduce you to the ARM architecture. Then you’ll clearly understand how Java helps solve this problem and united the whole of the mobile industry together.
Next Article: The rise of Java as a standard(coming soon)……
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