Apple’s on a roll and BlackBerry’s maker is feeling the squeeze. But who else is fighting for control of the mobile internet? Is it game over or too close to call?Smartphones are becoming pervasive: more than half the UK population has a phone that can browse the internet and run apps, and nearly half of US mobile users do too. It’s a market that’s bigger in number, and almost certainly worth more in revenues, than the PC market that we’ve been so familiar with for the past couple of decades.Yet smartphone brands can rise and fall in the commercial blink of an eye. Five years ago, Apple hadn’t sold a single smartphone, and Microsoft and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion doubted that the iPhone could work. Finland’s Nokia dominated the (tiny) market with its Symbian platform. Barely anyone outside Google had ever heard of “Android”, a company started by ex-Apple staffer Andy Rubin and bought in 2005 by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin – who made the deal without telling their chief executive Eric Schmidt.To read this report in The Guardian in full, see:
www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/24/battle-of-the-smartphones