Changing the way we live, one app at a time.

With the recent release of the IPhone 6 and IPhone 6 Plus I decided to take a look back and examine how the “smartphone” has evolved in the previous years and how it got to the extremely powerful handheld devices we all have and use today.

The first phone that incorporated PDA functions was an IBM phone called SIMON in 1992 and apart from receiving messages and calls, it was also able to send and receive faxes and emails and had other capabilities such as a calendar an address book and was able to keep track of appointments.

From this moment on the era of the PDA was born, with companies such as Blackberry, HTC, Nexus and Nokia dominating the market. We must remember that at the time the word “smartphone” was not yet coined, therefore these phones were only known as PDA’s or Personal Device Assistant.

It was only in 2007 when Apple released the first generation IPhone, a breakthrough in “smartphone” mass production, that the world started shifting from regular phones to the so-called smartphones.

The first generation IPhone successfully introduced to the masses the functions of the multi-touch touchscreen, even though it wasn’t the first (Mitsubishi DiamondTouch 2001). With the IPhone 2G Apple successfully and forcefully set a standard for the phone industry and since then every company has imitated the competitive advantage that Apple created by incorporating the functions of a PDA and part of the functions of a PC into a handheld device, into a design that was acclaimed and resulted in a domino effect where everyone wanted to have an IPhone. Since then Apple has been progressing at a steady pace and released a new version of its IPhone lineup every year. After 7 years since the introduction Apple has released 8 versions of the Phone, one significantly better than the last one, but competitors like Samsung have been catching up and now create phones that are more powerful.

Two companies, Apple and Samsung, which fight every time a new device comes out creating a division between the customers, dominate this market.

People often argue displaying empty statistics such as market share and performance. These statistics are useless unless seen under the big scheme of things, for example Samsung as a slightly bigger market share, but apple make way higher profits, plus 70% of apple users keep updated and use the newest OS that Apple has to offer while only 35% of Android users run the latest version KitKat.

It’s statistics like these that obfuscate the market and do not let the true facts emerge. Apple created the first MASS PRODUCTION AND MASS DISTRIBUTION smartphone and since then has been leading the market, I’m not talking about performance, quality or appeal ability. From a strict economic perspective Apple is way beyond Apple, and at the end of the day that is the only fact that matters because both companies are in the market to make profits, otherwise they’d give out phones for free.

Apple has set THE standard for phones and as a result has overthrown dominating companies like Nokia and Blackberry. The IPhone took the world by storm and set the benchmark on which phones had to be compared from that point on, and since then it has steadily increased that benchmark higher and higher. I’m not saying that IPhones are the best smartphones out there, I’m simply stating that if you mention to the majority of people you mention the word “smartphone” the first thought that comes into their head is IPhone or Apple.