国际英语新闻：Winners, losers in smartphone revolution

In February 2011 Nokia announced a plan to make Microsoft Windows Phone 7 its high end smartphone operating system, reducing MeeGo to a research platform while still keeping Symbian for mid range and low range products.

Comparing with Windows Mobile and BlackBerry, Apple's iPhone and Android Google phones are younger brothers and sisters. However, the two latecomers became the strong competitors to lead the smartphone market.

According to Wikipedia, it was not until 2007 that Apple Inc. introduced its first iPhone. It was initially costly, priced at 500 U.S. dollars for the cheaper of two models on top of a two- year contract.

However, it was one of the first smartphones to be mainly controlled through its touchscreen. It was the first mobile phone to use a multi-touch interface, and it featured a web browser that was described as "far superior" to anything offered by that of its competitors.

The Android operating system for smartphones was released in 2008. Android is an open source platform backed by Google along with major hardware and software developers such as Intel, HTC, ARM,Motorola and Samsung that form the Open Handset Alliance.

The first phone to use the Android OS was the HTC Dream, branded for distribution by T-Mobile as the G1. The software suite included on the phone consists of integration with Google's proprietary applications, such as Maps, Calendar, and Gmail, and a full HTML web browser.

Now it is not exaggerating to say that there is an iPhone fever in the world. The release of iPhone 4 last year has pushed the smartphone to a new age.