We have recently completed a series of articles about what phones and smartphones looked like before the Apple iPhone (before 2007), so it’s time to talk about the development of the mobile industry after the release of the «best smartphone in human history». Since 2007, trends have changed dramatically, with some manufacturers immediately adapting and copying Apple’s concept. Others stubbornly ignored the iPhone idea and went bankrupt. Let’s recall how well-known phone manufacturers moved, what decisions they made, and what it led to.
Even before the release of the iPhone, the French company Alcatel experienced stagnation, it seemed that the division should be closed, but later the brand managed to adapt and began to produce affordable touch phones (some with a QWERTY keyboard), and later switched to smartphones with Android OS.
The company’s problems were not going well, but the attempt to come back was not a failure. For a long time after the OT-S853, Alcatel did not release cool multimedia flagships, focusing only on phones for calls.
In the early heyday of Android and iOS, budget QWERTY phones with Java were in great demand. They sold well among poor young people who were eager to join the world of social networks and messaging, but had no money for a smartphone. Later, the OT-890 Android model and its numerous sequels appeared.
Alcatel did not offer flagships, but confidently occupied the budget segment of the market. Smartphones were produced under this brand until 2022, as it was impossible to compete with China any further. It’s amazing that the European brand has survived for so long, holding on exclusively to the budget part of the market.
Many people don’t know it, but Acer produced smartphones 15 years ago, and they were excellent. The only bad one was the Acer F1 flagship, which made it clear that resistive screens were outdated. After several Windows Mobile models, the company switched to Android, and it was the right decision.
Things were going well, interesting tablets appeared, engineers allowed themselves to experiment with Intel processors, which went quite far. For example, in 2015, the Acer Predator 8 gaming tablet on Intel Atom x7-Z8700 was released, and the company’s latest device was the Acer Chromebook Tab 10 (also a tablet).
Despite a good start, Acer lost the race of budget smartphones to other Chinese manufacturers. Soon, the company decided that it was irrational to support the mobile division, so it stopped further development of smartphones.
The Taiwanese giant Asus has not abandoned its mobile division, unlike Acer, and still continues to produce premium smartphones. But what were the models of this manufacturer 17 years ago, in the year of the iPhone release?
Even before the world’s most popular Apple phone appeared, Asus had cool Windows Mobile devices, and the most memorable models were those with a combined input method. For example, the Asus P525 with a compact keyboard and touchscreen was a fairly versatile solution in the days of imperfect resistive sensors.
The advent of the iPhone did not change the plans to produce similar models, but the company thought about further development only in the touch segment. While in 2008 Asus P750 (one of the company’s best phones) was released as a successful continuation of its predecessors, in 2009 there were no such buttoned-up beauties.
Apple made it clear to Asus that nobody needs keys. The Taiwanese giant realized this and «laid low for two years. The engineers did not sit idle, but worked actively all this time, so in 2011 the company began to produce new devices (mainly tablets).
The recognizable brand sold well, which allowed it to gradually enter the smartphone segment. The emphasis on Zenfone’s compactness gave it a chance to win a large fan base, and gaming ROG Phones still attract gamers. Although Asus’s share of the mobile market is incredibly small now, the company is not going to give up, releasing a minimum number of high-end models annually.
Blackberry didn’t really believe in the success of the iPhone, so despite the release of Storm models (which had an inconvenient touch screen), the Canadian brand produced classic models that sold well for some time among old-school fans who were not interested in all these newfangled «iPhones».
Blackberry smartphones were all about mechanical keyboards and business texting, and the iPhone completely broke that concept, proving that people wanted the opposite. The mass consumer gladly replaced mechanical buttons with huge touch screens, and operators started selling data, not minutes.
This made the sales of Blackberry smartphones disastrously poor. Attempts to switch them to touch screens (Storm, Curve series) or a touch + keyboard combination (Bold, Torch) did not yield positive results. The updated Blackberry OS 10 system allowed the company to survive for a few more years before completely switching to Android.
A successful device from Blackberry was the Blackberry Playbook tablet, which competed with the Apple iPad 2. The advantage of the «Playbook» was its dual-core operating system, which allowed it to run Android apps without any emulators. Nevertheless, the company did not continue the Playbook series and later abandoned its own operating system.
It would seem that Blackberry on OS had every chance to recover and re-emerge among global manufacturers, but Chinese companies had other plans. Brands from China destroyed Blackberry by dumping prices for their smartphones, giving it no chance to compete with brands such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, Realme, etc.
The company’s latest attempts in the form of Blackberry Passport, Key, Keynote, Priv finally buried the chances of the mobile division’s existence. Since then, the legendary Blackberry smartphones are just history, pleasant memories of the times when people communicated via e-mail without consuming hundreds of gigabytes of traffic per month, as modern smartphones with social networks do now.
The Finnish giant was too confident, sticking to the old «beliefs» that had existed in the company for decades. Despite the huge success of the iPhone, the company was in no hurry to switch to touchscreens or change its operating system. This led to the extinction of Nokia and its transformation into an unsuccessful HMD company, which still produces phones, but in the budget segment.
Looking up to Apple’s iPhone, Nokia launches the disastrous, terrible Nokia N96, which turned out to be worse than its predecessor in everything but the amount of internal storage. The 16 GB storage was the end of the benefits, as the owners of the new flagship got worse battery life, a weaker camera, a poor quality body, and stagnant processor performance.
In addition to the N96, the Finns produced many Symbian smartphones and classic Series 40-based phones. Nokia N82, N79, N86, E72 – they had luxurious functionality, much better than the iPhone of the time, but looked outdated at the time of release.
People would rather not stare at 2.4-inch screens while playing Java games and using Opera Mini. The first iPhone set new standards and made it clear that the future only belongs to touchscreen smartphones with powerful processors that allow you to work with web applications like a computer.
There were few touchscreen models, and they only teased their owners. The notional Nokia 5800 sold very well, but it is still considered the benchmark for how not to make touchscreen smartphones.
The nightmare called Symbian 9.4 tormented its owners for a long time, until the appearance of the luxurious, without exaggeration, Symbian Anna (then Belle). It took Nokia too long to fix this operating system, but it was too late. Android and iOS had captured too much of the market, and the technological limitations of Symbian (without support for multicore processors) forced it to be abandoned.
The company also failed to perfect the MeeGo system in the N9 smartphone. This model was ahead of its time because at the time, the Android UI after the N9 seemed like a real amateurish garbage, assembled on the knee in three days. The system really looked gorgeous, but the lack of third-party software buried this great development.
Things were not going well on the Windows Phone front either, and all because of cheap Android smartphones. China actively sponsored its national brands, literally destroying European, American, and Japanese manufacturers. What else is needed? Google gives you a free operating system, and the government allocates money.
Thanks to its ease of development, low cost, and huge investments by Google, Android smartphones have supplanted Windows Phone. Despite this, Nokia had several Android models with modified shells. If not for the deal with Microsoft, the Finnish company could have been actively competing for customers for some time, but it didn’t happen.
Microsoft realized that this was a bad purchase, so they sold Nokia to HMD, which in turn began to revive the name of the great brand. After 2016, things went well: The Nokia 6 received a build quality higher than the best flagships of the time, the Nokia 3 sold well in the budget segment, and the Nokia 8 Sirocco gained well-deserved respect among premium smartphone fans.
Nevertheless, the aforementioned price dumping by Chinese manufacturers did not help Nokia’s recovery. More affordable smartphones pushed Nokia out, despite long updates, regular security patches, a clean system, and all the other advantages that HMD marketers tried to promote.
For now, the company is still hanging on and is the last European smartphone manufacturer. The only sad thing is that HMD no longer uses the Nokia brand (only for push-button phones), although it does produce budget Android models.
Nokia’s history shows that you can’t ignore seemingly invisible threats. In 2007, the iPhone did not seem to be a problem for the world market leader. The inability to adapt in time has led to the fact that the now mighty mastodon of technology is on the verge of survival.
After the release of the iPhone, HTC was doing great because their smartphones had the same concept (big screen, minimal buttons, simple interface) as Apple’s, but offered more business features. HTC’s Windows Mobile smartphones were the best of their kind, leaving Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Mitac, Asus, and Acer far behind.
The legendary HTC HD 2 became the first mass-market smartphone with a 4.3-inch screen (iPhone 3GS has 3.5 inches) and also allowed to work with two operating systems (Android + Windows Mobile). It was a time when Android smartphones in the US were considered prestigious, not shameful because HTC was synonymous with quality and technology.
Although HTC’s best models sold ten times worse than Apple’s iPhone, it was enough for the company to grow steadily. The Taiwanese brand carved out its own niche in the market and was swimming in money despite the presence of competitors from Korea and Japan.
While Apple only helped HTC gain popularity, Chinese manufacturers finally decided the fate of the brand of the friendly Taiwanese people. The companies that came out of the woodwork offered an unprecedented ratio of parameters to cost, so HTC flagships no longer looked like a rational purchase.
After the successful models HTC M7 (with a luxurious 4 MP camera that will bring modern budget phones to their knees), M8, M9, things went downhill because it was then that the massive growth of manufacturers from China began. Why pay for HTC when you have Xiaomi?
Several years of struggle and the economic war against China was lost, and the technology leader, the best manufacturer of «business» smartphones HTC became an outcast, a forgotten brand that literally no one else wants.
Despite its extinction, HTC has left a great mark in the history of mobile technology as a brand that understood the principle of «the right smartphone» for the people in time, leaving dozens of cool models (Diamond, Touch, Dream, HD2, Hero, Nexus One, Legend, Desire, Gratia, Wildfire, Sensation, EVO 3D, M7). But he had no chance of winning the war against the world’s largest economy.
The Korean manufacturer was working on all fronts, simultaneously producing push-button models (there were especially many clamshells) and investing a lot of resources in promoting touchscreen phones. Most of them had proprietary firmware with a Java virtual machine, but later the first successful smartphones appeared, such as the LG KS20.
Marketers were well aware of the seriousness of the iPhone threat, but engineers had nothing to counter the best smartphone in history. Apple’s problem was the high cost of their devices, so LG (along with Samsung) set about developing budget phones with as large touchscreens as possible.
It was the right decision that introduced the touchscreen to millions of users for the first time. Most of those phones were slow, had a resistive screen, which was inconvenient to use, but this did not prevent them from selling. People were tired of push-button phones, so since 2008, many models like the LG GD510 have been born.
With the advent of Android (the cooperation with Windows Phone was short-lived), LG’s business took off. The free operating system with easy-to-write software allowed LG to become a leading manufacturer. The flagship Optimus models hindered Samsung’s sales of the Galaxy S series, although people still stood in kilometer-long lines for Apple iPhones.
Then the story almost completely repeats HTC’s — big China swallows everyone. LG smartphones were not bad at all and were produced until recently, but something did not allow them to compete successfully, or rather, to make a profit. Cheaper brands of Chinese origin pushed LG out of the domestic market.
Their devices were sold until 2022, but not in Ukraine, so many considered LG to be a long-dead company in the mobile segment.
Although the American company has not survived to this day (it was sold to the Chinese from Lenovo), it has been confidently taking a large part of the market from Apple for a long time, especially in the homeland of both brands. After the release of the Apple iPhone, Motorola engineers could not decide on the direction of development for a long time.
Since 2007, Motorola has released a lot of interesting Linux-based smartphones. They didn’t become big sellers, having no chance of displacing Windows Mobile or Symbian, but they became an important support and experience that came in handy when the company switched to Android OS two years later.
In addition to touchscreen Linux models like the A1800 and A1210, there was also a push-button flagship ZN5 with a top-of-the-line Kodak camera. All of them had great potential, especially for technically advanced users, but the lack of sufficient software available stopped typical buyers.
In addition, there were attempts to enter the Symbian segment with Motorola RIZR Z8 and Z10 sliders. Despite the availability of various smartphones, it was the image phones with thin metal bodies, especially clamshells, that sold best. This scheme could work, but not for long because more and more people wanted an iPhone or something similar to it.
2008 was a difficult year for Motorola, but with the advent of Android OS, things changed dramatically. An open and completely free system with huge subsidies from Google allowed the company to regain its position in the mobile phone market.
The release of the Motorola MILESTONE in 2009 gave hope, which marketers and engineers managed to realize. The DROID series smartphones were stuffed with the latest technology. The super-powerful flagships managed to take away some of Apple’s potential buyers because back then the iPhone could still bring all manufacturers to their knees, as it does now.
Motorola allowed itself to experiment with form factors, releasing side sliders or classic monoblocks (without OS) with QWERTY keyboards, but the latter were becoming less and less common. Things were going great, Motorola was selling like hotcakes, but there was no sequel to the legendary RAZR V3, which was released in 2019.
In addition to smartphones, there were cool XOOM tablets and Moto 360 watches (pioneers in the field of smartwatches). Of course, a lot has changed since Lenovo bought Motorola 10 years ago, but the development strategy for this brand has remained unchanged.
It’s sad that there is no longer a continuation of the series of smartphones with an acrylic display coating (Droid Turbo 2), which cannot be broken by dropping the device from the 10th floor to concrete. The only drawback was that the coating was easily scratched in everyday use.
Motorola continues to produce exclusively «pure» Android smartphones without proprietary shells with ads or unnecessary software. New reviews are regularly published at ITC, and the phones themselves can be found in almost every store.
Currently, Motorola has some of the best smartphones in the budget and mid-range price categories, although it is difficult for them to compete with the expensive flagships of Samsung and Apple.
Vast development experience and the right approach, quick adaptation to new market realities allowed Motorola not only to stay on its feet after the release of the iPhone, but also to survive the invasion of competitors. Of course, now it is also «purebred Chinese», but it at least honors Google’s traditions, leaving the system almost untouched.
Although it is too early to summarize the overall results, as not all brands have been considered in this part, interim conclusions can be drawn. Global companies followed different paths, but all of them were united by the fear of the inevitable changes brought by the Apple iPhone.
Those who were more responsible for the new standards managed to survive, adapted, and are now struggling with new challenges, while others have simply left their names in the annals of history or are trying to survive with their last strength in this world of incredible competition.
In the next installment, we conclude the landmark series of articles about the world before and after the Apple iPhone. Next week, we will look into the history of Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Phillips, Panasonic, Palm, and HP. It should be interesting because it was the Palm Pre that inspired companies like Google and Apple to implement gesture control.
Samsung used a cunning strategy, chasing all the birds at once, while Sony stubbornly refused to adopt new standards like Nokia, and paid a staggering loss of market share.
*Phone images taken from Gsmarena.
Did you like the article? Then be sure to check out the series of materials about phones and smartphones before the Apple iPhone. The volume is huge, so we have divided it into several issues, starting from 2000.
The world of mobile technology before the Apple iPhone: the best phones of 2000-2001
The world of mobile technology before the Apple iPhone: the best phones of 2002-2003
The world of mobile technology before the Apple iPhone: the best phones of 2004
The world of mobile technology before the Apple iPhone: the best phones of 2005 (Part 1)
The world of mobile technology before the Apple iPhone: the best phones of 2005 (Part 2)
The world of mobile technology before the Apple iPhone: the best phones of 2006