The world of smartphones after the Apple iPhone: Samsung, Panasonic, Sony Ericsson, Palm and HP (Part 2)

Finally, we conclude the epoch-making story of how the Apple iPhone changed the world once and for all. In the second part, we summarize the results by conducting a detailed analysis of the best mobile technologies of the 20th century. We will also look at the history of several other major brands that laid a solid foundation for modern technological progress and the development of an entire civilization. Some survived and adapted, while others became history due to their unwillingness to see obvious market trends.

Content

1 Samsung
2 Sony Ericsson
3 Panasonic
4 Palm and HP
5 Conclusions

Samsung

Samsung’s engineers and marketers should be commended for making a win-win situation by chasing all the birds with one stone. The company was releasing touchscreen phones as a priority two years after the release of the iPhone, and it was pushing in all directions.

Samsung made Java phones with proprietary firmware available, as well as smartphones on Windows Mobile, Symbian, Bada, Windows Phone, and Android. Its own Bada development had good potential and was a backup in case of failure of Google’s OS, but then its development was shut down.

The Windows Phone system did not last long either. Samsung released only a few models, focusing on Android. It was the right decision, but a balanced one, after several years of analyzing the market and competitors.

Windows Mobile and Symbian helped the company gain experience and stay afloat in the first years after the iPhone’s release, when many users still needed classic smartphones, often with push-button or QWERTY keyboards.

Of course, the Windows Mobile push-button models i200, i600, i780, and B7350 had no chance of luring away iPhone buyers, but they did find their niche. There were also cool Symbian smartphones, direct competitors to the Nokia N-Series. One of the last of these was the i7110 with a 2.6-inch AMOLED screen and «full minced meat» class stuffing.

Due to the extremely wide (no one else had such a choice) model range, Samsung phones sold well, and analysts collected information and decided where to direct the company’s resources. It is not surprising that Samsung began to put more and more pressure on touchscreen phones, including occupying the budget segment.

Uncomfortable, with a bad sensor, slow, not optimized, but cheap Samsung Star, Monte, Corby became bestsellers among those who could not afford a $1000 Apple iPhone. Since then, the Korean company has realized that push-button phones are only for pensioners who are interested in making calls.

With the advent of Android, the company was in no hurry to place all bets on this system. Simultaneously releasing the top Symbian 9.4 flagship i8910, the super-powerful i8000 with Windows Mobile 6.5, its own S8500 Wave on Bada OS, cool camera phones (without OS) of the Pixon series, and later the first Android models.

Thanks to its luxurious AMOLED screens, Samsung has earned its fame, and the company’s vast resources have allowed it to work in many areas simultaneously. Samsung not only assembles technology, but also produces screens, batteries, memory, processors, and much more.

It is thanks to its own production that the company is still afloat despite the fierce price dumping of competitors. Although Samsung has been producing top Android flagships (the most popular in the world) since 2010, it has not been able to take the title of the best phone from the Apple iPhone, and the technological gap has only been widening over the past few years.

If the first Samsung Galaxy S1, S2, and S3 were tied with the iPhone in terms of technology (screens, cameras, processor speed), now the gap is huge and not in favor of the Korean manufacturer. Nevertheless, it is worth paying tribute to this major brand, which holds the lead among Android smartphones.

Despite scandals with burning batteries, government subsidies for competitors, and the power of Apple, Samsung has retained its honor, relevance, fame, and popularity in the modern world, having gone through a thorny path, defeating the mastodon Nokia.

But what will happen next? Obviously, Apple has created a world of its own, beyond competition, which no other manufacturer, not even Samsung, can influence, but will the Korean beauty be able to withstand the pressure of brands from the Middle Kingdom? Only time will tell…

Sony Ericsson

The sad story of Sony Ericsson shows that it is better to copy the leader than to stubbornly stand on your standards, which are already outdated. The Swedish-Japanese manufacturer was so confident that it did not want to change, just like Nokia. This is not surprising because having the best Java platform in history, there was no strong motivation to change anything.

After 2006, a period of stagnation began for Sony Ericsson: The K850 failed and was not surprising after the K800, the A100 platform did not receive any major changes, Symbian UIQ did not develop in any way, and the company did not even smell Windows Mobile smartphones.

The transition to the A200 platform also turned out to be a minor one, but the real problem was the company’s reluctance to produce touchscreen smartphones. For a long time after the iPhone was released, new push-button models (K550, W902, W890) with tiny screens were released. They had good cameras, musical potential, and could run any Java game.

It seemed like what else was needed? The problem was that this concept of a mobile phone had been around since 2003, and the iPhone showed a completely different world. A world where there is no need to rewrite a web page for mobile devices, and content can be consumed on a buttonless, huge screen with easy-to-use controls.

Despite Japanese stubbornness and Swedish naiveté, Sony Ericsson decided to develop touchscreen smartphones based on Windows Mobile. The platform was a poor choice, as it was living out its last days, but the transition to Android changed everything.

The introduction of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play was a real celebration among mobile gamers, as the smartphone offered a gaming experience never before seen on a phone, close to the Sony PSP. Other models in the Xperia series also sold well as a cheaper alternative to the iPhone, but it didn’t last long.

The situation is identical to HTC, LG, and other AAA manufacturers and can be explained in one word «China». Subsequently, Sony Ericsson reformatted, and new smartphones began to be produced under the Sony brand. The invasion of cheaper and more functional Android smartphones pushed Sony into the domestic market, where the company still exists.

In addition, Sony is trying to sell Xperia flagships in other countries, but sales are so bad that most people simply do not know that such a brand exists. Sony Ericsson can only be blamed for ignoring gaming phones/smartphones for a long time before and after Xperia Play. Perhaps the direction of mobile gaming would have allowed these wonderful smartphones to gain a foothold in today’s extremely competitive world.

Panasonic

Many well-known brands have been working in the mobile technology segment for a long time, up to the massive dominance of Chinese manufacturers with a favorable «price/features ratio», but some buried themselves even before the iPhone appeared. One of them was Panasonic, which produced phones until 2019, although it had a big gap from 2005 to 2011.

The emergence of the Android OS interested the company, even after the seemingly complete closure of the mobile division in 2005. Panasonic subsequently came to life, producing tablets and smartphones, but sales did not justify themselves and the attempt to create «its iPhone» failed.

Panasonic fought for a place in the sun only with other Android smartphones, and budget ones at that. The lack of a powerful flagship and not the best price/performance ratio did not give the Japanese giant a chance to survive against Chinese manufacturers.

This is not to say that Panasonic smartphones were bad, but they were not memorable among thousands of models from other manufacturers. Interestingly, before the Apple iPhone, they surprised the world with unique shapes, offered top-of-the-line Symbian smartphones, and were among the most desired in Japan for a long time.

Palm and HP

Finally, we left Palm for a reason, because it was they who showed the correct interaction between a person and a smartphone, i.e. with the help of gestures. This happened with the release of the innovative Palm Pre, but we’ll get to it in order.

After the masterpieces of the Treo 650, the company began to stagnate, nothing new came out, and the Treo 750 was a minor update of its predecessors. It looked pale against its competitors because of its outdated, though very functional, operating system.

In 2008, the decision was made to switch to Windows Mobile. Smartphones such as Treo Pro 850 (made by HTC) and Treo 500v for Vodafone appeared under the Palm brand. The Centro smartphone on its own system only made us nostalgic, but it had nothing to offer against iOS, and we needed something fundamentally new.

The engineers took the challenge seriously and released the best smartphone, without exaggeration, in terms of human interaction on the touch screen. In 2009, there were many models with high-quality touchscreens, but they all used taps rather than gestures.

The Palm Pre became a phenomenon in the mobile industry, laying the foundation for the modern graphical user interface and control methods in smartphones that we use today. The webOS operating system broke the mold and looked like a guest from the future against Android.

A luxurious, well-drawn UI and gesture-based interaction — 15 years ago, this was a real miracle and a completely new user experience. Since touch screens were relatively small back then, the Palm Pre also had a mechanical keyboard. This made it an absolute winner against Apple’s flagships.

It was easy to operate the device, easy to minimize the desktop with one swipe and see all the running programs in the form of cards. It was webOS that stole this idea from Blackberry, and then Windows Phone, Android, iOS. Sadly, pioneers don’t always win the technological war.

This is how primitive Android looked back then.

Palm subsequently released the Pixi, Pre Plus, Pixi Plus, Pre 2, and later under the HP Pre 3 and Veer brand. They were a logical continuation of the innovative Pre, offered better specifications, an updated operating system, but failed to displace free Android with many free programs, and even more so iOS.

People could not yet fully appreciate all the advantages of Palm webOS, and the lack of proper support from software developers buried this unique development even further.

Despite its economic failure, Palm has made an invaluable contribution to the development of technology. If it weren’t for webOS, today’s iOS and Android would hardly look as user-friendly, let alone gesture-based. At the time of its release, Android 1.5 had an interface that looked like it had been made on a schoolboy’s knee in Paint in one hour.

The Palm Pre showed that sometimes an incredible, unique technological artifact can be born that a primitive society is unable to comprehend at the time. As time passes, mobile technology enthusiasts are increasingly realizing the significance of the Palm Pre for the entire industry and how breakthrough it really was in 2009.

Conclusions

The most important thing is that after the iPhone, manufacturers either followed in Apple’s footsteps, having a chance to take a bite of the pie, or died 2-3 years after the release of the first iPhone 2G. For some, the iPhone, on the contrary, became a driver, an impetus for success, but this is not enough because in addition to a good start, you still need to reach the finish line.

That’s why not all of the manufacturers listed above stayed afloat. Some quickly drowned because of their overconfidence, some started implementing the right ideas too late, and others did everything right, although they could not withstand the pressure of competitors.

In any case, all of these smartphones have made a significant contribution to the development of society, along with the Apple iPhone, which literally turned not only mobile technology upside down, but the entire world. It’s hard to imagine what our society would be like without social media and smartphone addicts who spend 8-12 hours in front of the screen.

Perhaps the world would be a better place, people would communicate more in person, watch less video (95% of traffic porn sites from smartphones), people would talk on the phone instead of throwing emoticons, and children would not have problems concentrating due to short vertical videos. Unfortunately, we will never know…

*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

The world of smartphones after the Apple iPhone: HTC, Motorola, LG, Nokia, Blackberry and others (Part 1)