Feature Articles

A Call from the Past - 10 Years of Mobile Phone Development

By Seow Tein Hee - 11 May 2009

Timeline: 2002

2002

  • In a day and time when multi-functional cellular phones rose to its calling, there was also the popular Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) manufacturer, Palm, which was well known for its devices' ability to keep your schedules organized and synced to your PC with ease. The first foray into the PDA phones market for www.hardwarezone.com came in the form of the Palm Handspring Treo 180.

With a strong presence in the PDA market, Palm dabbled further with its Palm Handspring Treo 180, paving the way for a new line of devices that's caters to the business executives.

  • The emergence of the various OS such as Pocket PC 2002 (with its current iteration as the Windows Mobile platform) and the Symbian UIQ and S60 series posed stiff competition to Palm's dominance over the PDA market in the earlier days. But whilst the three main mobile phone operating systems were slugging it out with each other, Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of the Blackberry, came out in full force by 2002, providing e-mail solutions to the corporate executives who require a 24/7 connection to their work mails.

The introduction of the Blackberry cellular phone, or jokingly called "Crackberry" due to the highly addictive nature for one to constantly check their emails, realized the potential of having direct access to your work with just a simple cellular connection running on GPRS.

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