June 3, 2011: iOS overtakes Research in Motion’s BlackBerry operating system for the first time, with Apple’s mobile operating system inching past BlackBerry OS.
While Android remains comfortably in the lead in terms of market share, the news marks the beginning of the end for BlackBerry as a smartphone powerhouse.
December 17, 2009: Apple finally triumphs over longtime rival Microsoft … on mobile operating systems market share. New data shows that iPhone OS surpasses Windows Mobile in the United States for the first time.
With roughly 36 million Americans owning smartphones, a quarter of them run Apple’s mobile operating system, according to figures released by research firm Comscore.
Two monumental events happened this week. Apple became the first U.S. company to be worth an astonishing $3 trillion. And a day later came the official end of BlackBerry — a series of phones that once dominated the market.
The collapse of BlackBerry is proof that today’s winners aren‘t inevitably tomorrow’s. While in the coming years Apple could become the first company to reach $4 trillion, it also could start down a path that ends in failure.
Here’s some of what Apple will do so it doesn’t end up like BlackBerry.
A Malaysian man perished in a fire in his bedroom, but his family and his company say he was actually killed when the phone charging near his bed exploded.
“He had two phones, one Blackberry and a Huawei. We don’t know which one exploded,” said the brother-in-law of Nazrin Hassan, the CEO of a venture capital fund.
The world may have passed its peak smartphone moment last year.
Smartphone sales data released today from the number crunchers at Gartner revealed that worldwide smartphone sales declined for the first time ever during the last quarter of 2017. Both Apple and Samsung saw their market share decline just slightly, but good news could be on the horizon.
It might be the most successful smartphone on the planet, but the iPhone didn’t become what it is today without some failures along the way.
Even before the device made its much-anticipated debut in 2007, Apple overcame big missteps and mistakes. It tried putting iTunes on other phones. It believed we didn’t need native apps. It entered into embarrassing partnerships with big bands.
As Cult of Mac looks back over the iPhone’s history to celebrate the device’s 10th anniversary, in collaboration with Wired UK, 10 big failures stick out like a sore thumb.
Predicting the future is tough, even for the experts. That’s the only lesson we can learn from looking back at these horribly misguided iPhone predictions that greeted the device at its launch 10 years ago.
Before most people had even wrapped their fingers around Apple’s first-gen smartphone, tech pundits, analysts and competing CEOs were already writing off the iPhone as a disaster similar to Apple’s previous excursions into video game consoles and the like.
Here are just a few of the laughable reactions that greeted the iPhone in 2007.
Donald Trump has been forced to give up his beloved Android smartphone as he steps into the White House.
He has now been issued a “secure, encrypted device approved by the Secret Service,” alongside a new phone number that only a few people will posses.
If you thought people were getting tired of the iPhone, think again.
Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) released a new report today, suggesting that the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus launch marks an uptick in switchover of Android users over to Apple.
The rotting corpse of Blackberry Ltd. may provide the extra juice needed to get Apple’s car project rolling.
Apple has reportedly poached key engineers from BlackBerry’s QNX team in Canada to help develop the operating system for its self-driving car. And the iPhone-maker has set up shop just five-minutes away from the QNX offices.
As Apple’s “secret” electric car project gains momentum, the company continues to pick up top talent for their automotive experience.
Its latest hire is Dan Dodge, founder and former CEO of QNX, who was recently the head of BlackBerry’s automotive software team. The move comes after “Project Titan,” the codename for Apple Car, started to take a whole new direction.
Swift, the programming language that creates apps for all of Apple’s hardware, had a pretty happy 2015, according to a report from job site Freelancer.com.
The data comes from 1,429,842 “good” projects — that is, “those which have been filtered for spam, advertising, self promotion, reposts, or that are otherwise unlikely to be filled,” the published report says. And Swift was the big winner, especially when you compare its numbers to 2014’s.
You can see more in the infographic below.
BlackBerry CEO John Chen has waded in on the the question of whether or not Apple is right to refuse to help the government access smartphone data for security purposes.
“For years, government officials have pleaded to the technology industry for help,” Chen wrote in a recent blogpost. “Yet [the requests] have been met with disdain.”
Chen’s position is simple: that, “We are indeed in a dark place when companies put their reputations above the greater good.”
The Apple-watching world just about blew a gasket when the Apple Pencil was first announced for the iPad, given Steve Jobs’ famous assessment that, “If you see a stylus, [Apple engineers] blew it!”
With that in mind, how would people react if the next iPhone went again Jobs’ wishes by taking a note out of BlackBerry’s playbook and included a physical keyboard as part of the handset? Not too well, we’re guessing, but you can make up your own mind about whether or not it would be a good thing or not by checking out the below concept video.
(Hint: it isn’t a good thing.)
Modern mobile phones need a lot of power; chances are we’ve all got an external battery pack (or at least a second cable and wall plug) tucked away in a bag somewhere that will charge up our Android and iOS mobile phones while we’re on the run.
The thing is, those things need to be taken along with you when you leave the house. If you’re like me, though, that requires a heck of a lot of cognitive overhead and pre-planning.
The whole point of the Nipper, this tiny new mobile phone charger that uses two AA batteries to give you a bit of juice when needed, is to always be available.
The Typo Keyboard is dead. Long live… well, other iPhone 6 cases, we guess.
In a rare win for BlackBerry, the company today announced that it has come to an agreement with Typo, the Ryan Seacrest-funded company behind the BlackBerry-style iPhone keyboard. The agreement means that Typo will cease selling its keyboards for any device under 7.9-inches in size.
President Barack Obama is finally ready to enter the age of social media. After sitting behind the Resolute desk for six years, the president finally opened his own Twitter account today, but rather than using his hacker-proof BlackBerry to send his first message, POTUS turned to an Apple product.
Here’s his first tweet, sent from an iPhone:
BlackBerry’s smartphone business is imploding in a big way in the U.K., where the company is currently losing around 56,000 users every month to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, new research shows.
Just two years ago, the Canadian company had around 8 million non-business users in the U.K., but that figure is expected to fall below 1 million by the end of this year.
You’d think one patent-infringement lawsuit would be enough, but Ryan Seacrest’s iPhone case startup clearly didn’t get the message after its last courtroom tangle with BlackBerry.
The new Typo Keyboard for the iPhone 6 was supposed to have fixed any infringement issues committed by its predecessor, but that is apparently not the case. This week BlackBerry filed another lawsuit against Typo, claiming the case maker “slavishly copied” its keyboard design “down to the smallest detail.”
Remember Typo? They were the Ryan Seacrest-backed company that released a case that gave your iPhone a BlackBerry-like QWERTY keypad.
Not so surprisingly, BlackBerry wasn’t happy. The company sued Typo for “blatantly copying” the BlackBerry’s iconic keyboard.
Now there’s good news for BlackBerry. The beleaguered smartphone maker is getting a much-needed cash injection as a result of the lawsuit, because Typo has been ordered to pay a nearly $1 million fine.
There was a time before iPhones, when BlackBerry was the go-to name when it came to high quality smartphones. Those days are now well and truly over, although BlackBerry is still on the lookout for ways to even the playing field.
In a new blogpost over on the official BlackBerry website, CEO John Chen argues for a net neutrality-style “app neutrality,” which would see Apple legally compelled to make its popular iMessage service for BB10 handsets.
“Unfortunately, not all content and applications providers have embraced openness and neutrality,” Chen writes. “Unlike BlackBerry, which allows iPhone users to download and use our BBM service, Apple does not allow BlackBerry or Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging service.”
BlackBerry isn’t quite dead yet, but don’t tell that to the person running their Twitter account.
The classic BlackBerry keyboard is great for pounding out 140-character tweets, yet whoever is tweeting from @BlackBerry was spotted using an iPhone to implore the brand’s few faithful remaining fans to keep up with the BlackBerry conversation on Twitter.
Android has yet again increased its lead in U.S. market share as its rivals give up precious points, according to the latest data from Kantar WorldPanel. Google’s popular platform now commands an impressive 61.8 percent share of the smartphone market, which is close to double the 32.6 percent now held by iOS.
The original Typo keyboard for the iPhone racked up quite a few column inches (or whatever the blogosphere equivalent might be) after it was revealed that none other than Ryan Seacrest had invested $1 million in it, shortly followed by BlackBerry filing a lawsuit against it, claiming that it was stealing the company’s trademark keyboard.
Well, the Typo is back — and apparently better than ever — thanks to the new Typo 2 keyboard, which is currently available for pre-order. Costing $99, the iPhone case essentially adds the functionality of a BlackBerry keyboard to your existing iPhone, although hopefully without looking so much like a BlackBerry that it provokes further legal action.
Snapchat is currently in talks with investors over a round of funding that could value the company at a mind-blowing $10 billion, according to sources for Bloomberg. That’s a little over half the $19 billion Facebook paid for WhatsApp, but double the $5 billion market cap currently held by BlackBerry.