With its purchase of Nokia's mobile phone business, Microsoft has brought a longtime partner into the fold to help fight a battle that has been tough for both companies.
Microsoft, which was late
to the smartphone game with its Windows mobile operating system, badly
trails Android and Apple's iOS. And while Nokia is still a force selling
feature phones worldwide, it's barely made a dent in the smartphone
market.
But if the Finnish company is struggling today, it can still take pride in its history at the forefront of the mobile movement.
Here are five ways the once-dominant phonemaker has helped shape the world of mobile electronics as we know it today:
First to move
It's not the sort of
thing that smartphone owners today probably remember -- if they're even
old enough. But the Nokia 1011, released in 1992, was the first
commercially available mobile phone that operated on what's called the
GSM network.
The letters stand for
Global System for Mobile. And what that meant was that unlike earlier
phones, the Nokia could be used to make a phone call from almost
anywhere in the world. GSM is still the world's most widely used mobile
system, although 4G is expected eventually to replace it.
Phone as fashion statement
A phone is just a phone, right? Of course not.
Today, there are plenty
of folks who, admit it or not, wrap at least a small part of their
identity up in what kind of phone is in their pocket.
That was a pretty alien
concept up until the early 2000s when, if you owned a cell phone, there
was a pretty good chance it was a Nokia. Remember those chunky, rounded
models with the tiny gray screens and the nubby antennas?
The Nokia 5110 was one
of the most popular. And it also was one of the market's first phones
that had a replaceable face plate. The plates came in a wide variety of
colors, offering one of the first chances to personalize your phone's
look.
The 'slider'
The popularity of early Nokia phones meant the company's designs often became the standard for cell phones.
It didn't create the
first flip phone (that honor belongs to Motorola), but the "slider" was
all Nokia. The first was the company's 8110 model, which debuted in
1998. How cutting edge was the design at the time? It was the phone of
choice in the futuristic 1999 sci-fi film "The Matrix."
Mobile gaming
Remember "Snake"?
It seems laughably
simple compared with the range of gaming possible on today's
smartphones. But plenty got addicted to this game.
Even though it had already been in arcades, Nokia began preloading "Snake" on its phones in 1998.
Don't hit your own tail.
Don't hit the walls. And what the heck were those things you were
eating, anyway? Who knows -- but "Angry Birds," "Candy Crush" and their
app-store brethren owe a tip of the digital cap to Nokia's vision of
telephone-as-gaming-device.
Windows warrior
Phones running the
Windows operating system haven't exactly set the marketplace on fire. In
the second quarter of this year, 7.4 million phones running Windows
were sold, according to Gartner Research. That's a long way behind the
No. 2 system, Apple's iOS, with 31.9 million phones sold in that time.
But Nokia has squarely
positioned itself as the leading vendor of those Windows phones, making
82% of the devices sold last year. In 2011, Windows and Nokia announced a
partnership in which Nokia switched to the Windows OS as the default
system running all of its handsets.
That hasn't been enough
to put Nokia on super-solid ground, at least not yet. But the
longstanding partnership is what led to Monday's purchase, and if having
in-house hardware gives Windows Phone a boost, Microsoft and Nokia will
reap the rewards.
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