Pages

Monday, 15 August 2011

Did You Know...?

In this era that we live in, when you ask someone about a smartphone, one of the following three choices seems to come more often that any other:

1.   Apple's iPhone,
2.   Research In Motion(RIM)'s Blackberry,
3.  Any phone with Google's Android Operating System, in short OS. (Although, Windows Phone is starting to pick up as well).

Although, as of right now, none of the above phones are the top manufacturer's in a mobile device1, they are still very popular and have a lot of usage within the people of North America, with Windows Phone starting to catch up.

Before we go on and have a debate about which phone is better and why or why not and etc., though it must be said that each of the phone has it's own little surprises, which we will talk about at a later time, let's start and talk a bit about the three companies, which is what we will do in this post.

Since there is a lot of usage of these phones in North America, and the rest of the world, it would be a great idea to learn about the three companies that bring the phone's to the standard they are at. And as an idea on how to learn about the companies, I thought it would great to have some fun facts about these three companies.

These fun facts are facts about each company on it's own and it is not necessarily a history behind the three companies, just a few facts that makes a nice impression for the company and/or its products, which you might or might not have known these facts about the three companies.

So let's start.

Apple:
The Apple Inc. campus is located in Cupertino, California. The campus is in a private U-shaped street called Infinite Loop, which is a programming concept of a loop that never ends. The street covers about thirty-two acres and has six buildings. Each building is numbered with one digit.2

Fortune magazine has named Apple the most admired company in the world for the last three years (2008-2010).3

Apple used to be known as Apple Computer Inc. But that changed on January 9, 2007 when the chairman and CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, announced that computers will no longer be the main focus of the company and hence changed the name to just Apple Inc. The event, known as Macworld Expo, also had the announcement of iPhone and Apple TV.2

Steve Jobs has a salary of only one-dollar per year. How does he make his living? Simply by stock. He holds 5.426 million Apple shares, as well as 138 million shares in Disney.4 He isn't the first or the only CEO to be in this situation. There are many CEO's that have one-dollar per year salary, they are known as the "Dollar-a-year Men".5

The original Apple logo had Isaac Newton on it, sitting under an apple tree. It was replaced with the one we are more familiar with, but when replaced, the apple was a rainbow colour, then it changed to black and finally, to the one we are familiar with, silver. The "bite" in the Apple logo was to differentiate it from a cherry.5

As of 2010, Apple has revenue of US $65.23 billion with a profit of over US $14.01 billion.2


RIM Blackberry: 
Research in Motion (RIM) is a Canadian telecommunications and mobile device company.

The first ever Blackberry device was the Blackberry 850 which was introduced in 1999 as a two-way pager in Munich, Germany6. In 2003, the more commonly known smartphone Blackberry was released, and they recently released their new tablet called Blackberry Playbook.

Blackberry’s were primarily known for their ability of sending and receiving push email.6 Push email is the ability of having your email from the server "pushed" to your phone right away. Although, many smartphones nowadays are starting to have push as well.

Blackberry is also known for their security of the phone, which is the reason why the President of United States of America, Barack Obama, still uses his Blackberry and for the same reason some countries, like United Arab Emirates, India and Saudi Arabia, had expressed reservations of its strong encryption.6

Blackberry is also referred to as “Crackberry” in North America, implying an addiction towards Blackberry same as towards crack, for some people.

There is only one Blackberry store in existence, as of 2009. It is located in Farmington Hills, Michigan, which opened in December 2007. Although, this wasn’t the first Blackberry store, there were three attempts before at opening a Blackberry store in Toronto, London and Charlotte.6

As of 2011, RIM has revenue of about US $19.90 billion with a net income of US $3.41 billion.6

Android: 
Android was not made by Google. Yes, that is correct; Android was devised by Andy Rubin and Rich Miner in 2003. Google bought it from them for US $50 million. Google kept it in a little box until November 5, 2007 when it decided/announced to launch the Android mobile platform. So what happened to Andy Rubin and Rich Miner? They are both at Google, Rubin is the director of mobile platforms and Miner the group manager.7

Android is an open source platform, which means anyone can access the code any time and change it anyway they would like, though it would only change the code they got.

The updates for Android code are named after Pastries. The past releases were named as Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, and Honeycomb. The new update, soon to be released, is named as Ice Cream Sandwich.8

The first ever mobile phone to run on Android operating system was HTC Dream which was released on October 22, 2008.7

There are many companies that use Android OS for their mobile devices, like HTC, Acer, Samsung, Sony Ericsson to name a few. There are also rumours that Dell will soon be launching a phone with Android OS as well.

Today, August 15, 2011, Google bought Motorola for US $12.50 billion.

As of July 2010, there are reports that Android is getting activated in more than 200,000 phones daily.

As of 2010, Google has revenue of US $29.32 billion with a profit of over US $8.50 billion. Now we must remember that this is Google we are talking about, not just Android; Google and all it’s products.9 

I hope you enjoyed reading this. Please comment, follow and share, it would be really helpful and much appreciated.

As my high-school teachers would say, "Now you can go home and tell your parents did you know..." Although, I think, most of you will/can go and tell your friends about it too.

Thank you once again for reading.

Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. Mustafa Ebadi15 August 2011 at 16:33

    Very well written Dude. I have to say I was working on a presentation when I saw this link, and this article was so interesting that I read it all.

    Its elegantly written, nicely laid out, and extremely interesting. Keep it up!

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)