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Brief History of Mobile Computing
- Mobile Computing = Computing + Mobility + Connectivity
- 1993 Apple: Newton Message Pad
- First hand-held computer.
- Display rotated 90, 180, or 270 degrees, depending on device orientation.
- Device ran the Newton operating system.
- Used handwriting recognition powered by Calligrapher handwriting recognition engine.
- 1996 US Robotics Palm Pilot
- The Palm Pilot was called a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)
- 1999 BlackBerry First Blackberry device was a two-way pager.
- 2002 The commonly known Convergent BlackBerry supported push email,
mobile telephone, text messaging, Internet faxing, Web browsing and other
wireless services.
- 2003 BlackBerry Quark first device with integrated email and phone.
- iPhone
- 1980s Objective-C language created by Cox and Love at their software company Stepstone
- 2007 First integrated smart phone; iPhone apps written in Objective C language
- 2014 Swift language released for writing iPhone apps. Swift has been characterized as Objective-C without the C.
- 2019 Currently there are more than 2 billion iPhone and iPad devices in use.
- Google and Android
- 1998 Google was founded by graduate students at Stanford.
- 2003 Android was founded by Rubin and Miner in Palo Alto, California.
- 2005 Google buys Android.
- 2007 Android operating system released. Based on the Linux kernel.
- 2007 Open Handset Alliance formed. A consortium of 84 companies joined to
develop Android as an open and free mobile platform. Members include Dell, Google, Intel,
Motorola, Nvidia, Qualcom, Sony, Sprint, T-Mobile. The member companies
agreed to produce compatible devices.
- 2008 First Android Device was T-mobile G1,
complete with fold out QUERTY keyboard.
- 2011 Apple sues Android device manufacturer Samsung, for patent
infringment. This resulted in a 1 billion dollar settlement, which was reduced
on appeal. The court battle was finally settled in 2018.
- 2019 Currently there are more than 3.3 billion Android users.