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Mobile terminal operating system, that is, the operating system used by mobile phones, tablet computers and other devices.

In today's highly developed mobile Internet, we may have used mobile terminal operating systems for far longer than desktop operating systems such as Windows.

So, do you really know these mobile terminal operating systems? What classic mobile terminal operating systems have emerged in the development of mobile phones for half a century? Which systems have been eliminated by the times?

Next, let's start today's story:

█ 1973-2000: the Sprout of Mobile operating system in 1973, Martin Cooper (Martin Cooper), an American Motorola engineer, invented the world's first mobile phone and ushered in the era of human mobile communication.

Martin Cooper and the mobile phone he invented at that time were bulky in appearance and simple in function. Not to mention surfing the Internet, not even texting, it can only be used to make phone calls.

This single-function mobile phone does not have a special operating system. There are only some designed programs to perform simple operations.

In the middle and late 1980s, with the continuous maturity of software and hardware technology, mobile phones began to become lighter, smaller and more convenient to operate.

The emergence and popularization of Nokia 1011 personal computer (PC), coupled with the rise of network technology, have jointly promoted the information tide of the whole society. More and more people come into contact with IT technology and compete to buy related digital electronic products.

At that time, some technology manufacturers keenly found that business elites generally have the demand for mobile office, and if they can produce miniaturized "Handheld PC" and realize "mobile office", there will be a huge market.

In 1984, the British company Psion released its own pocket computer product-Psion Organizer. Two years later, in 1986, they released a more advanced Organizer II.

Organizer II, with a slide cover, looks like a calculator. It has calculator, calendar, alarm clock and simple database functions. Organizer / Organizer II is considered to be the earliest practical PDA in the world. This kind of computer is also called PDA (Personal Digital Assistant, personal digital assistant).

In May 1992, Apple released its own PDA product and named it Newton MessagePad.

Newton MessagePad comes with a stylus to take notes, store contacts and manage calendars. At that time, PDA and mobile phones were two different products. The functions of PDA are more complex, but mobile phones have the ability to communicate.

In order to enable PDA to support more functions, manufacturers began to customize and develop a special PDA operating system. This kind of system can be said to be the earliest version of the mobile terminal operating system.

In Palm OS1993, a digital equipment company called Palm was officially established in the United States, dedicated to the R & D and production of PDA. However, due to lack of funds, they did not get off to a smooth start.

In September 1995, Co. Robotics saw the potential of Palm and invested in its acquisition. Soon after, in April 1996, the first Palm Pilot handheld was born, called Pilot 1000.

Pilot 1000Pilot 1000 has 256K memory and a 160 × 160 monochrome display screen, which supports address book, calendar, memo, to-do list and other functions. The operating system it uses is Palm OS 1.0 developed by palm itself.

At the end of 1997, Palm OS 2.0 was introduced, with the addition of e-mail and accounting software.

Later, Palm licensed Palm OS to IBM, HandSpring and Sony. These companies have produced some Palm OS-based products, which has gradually increased the popularity and influence of Palm OS. Buying and using Palm products became a trend for business people at that time.

In addition to Palm, BlackBerry OS has another company that has launched its own PDA products. This company is RIM (Research In Motion) from Canada.

RIMRIM's brand, which you may be more familiar with, is BlackBerry (BlackBerry).

RIM was born very early. In March 1984, the company was officially founded.

Their early business, which was to develop wireless display systems for TV screens, and some products such as bar code readers, were not very successful.

It was only in 1994 that RIM began to study wireless devices. In 1995, they launched a wireless interactive pager called Pager900, which can send and receive e-mail and got a good market response.

In Pager9001998, they produced PDA with a computer keyboard. In 1999, they launched the RIM 6230, the first BlackBerry that can talk.

RIM 6230 in order to better promote its own hardware products, RIM developed a special operating system-BlackBerry OS.

The system supports a series of functions, such as phone book, calendar, e-mail, mobile phone, text message, Internet fax, web browsing and so on.

If you are not familiar with Palm OS and BlackBerry OS, then you must know the two systems I would like to introduce.

Symbian, first of all, is Symbian.

Nokia and Symbian were the undisputed hegemons of the mobile phone market at the beginning of this century. They almost represent an era and are unforgettable memories of many mobile phone users (including me).

In fact, Symbian was not developed specifically for Nokia phones when it was born in the early days.

Symbian's predecessor was the EPOC system launched by Psion (the one mentioned earlier) in 1989.

The word EPOC comes from epoch, which means "the beginning of an era". Some media also believe that EPOC is an acronym for "Electronic Piece of Cheese", meaning "using electronic products is as simple as eating cheese."

In 1989, Psion released the first 16-bit computers with the EPOC operating system: MC200 and MC400 laptops.

In 1994, Psion began to develop a 32-bit EPOC32 system (developed with C++ for the ARM platform, and the previous 16-bit system was developed for the Intel 80186 platform).

In 1998, the EPOC32 system was successfully developed. In June of that year, Psion Software teamed up with Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola to form a company called Symbian Ltd. Donovan's company.

At the same time, EPOC / EPOC32 was officially renamed Symbian OS.

This is the origin of Symbian.

In 1999, Revo, netBook, Series 5mx, Series7 and other equipment all adopted the Symbian Release 5 system. Mobile phones from Ericsson and Nokia have also begun to adopt Symbian.

Windows CE is another familiar mobile operating system from Microsoft.

Microsoft, as a giant of desktop operating systems, will certainly not be indifferent to the rise of mobile devices. They quickly launched a plan to develop a dedicated operating system for mobile devices.

In 1996, Microsoft officially launched Windows CE 1.0.

This system can be seen as a simplified monochrome version of Windows 95, and its real full name should be Windows Embedded Compact (Windows for pocket embedded devices).

The source of the abbreviation of CE, Microsoft has no official description, probably is Compact Edition, Customer Embedded, Consumer Electronics and so on.

In 1997, Microsoft launched Windows CE 2.0. Although CE 2.0 is still based on Windows 95, its efficiency has been greatly improved and has been recognized by many users.

Comparison of market share in the second quarter of 2000

Palm OS:59.89%

Windows Mobile:26.56%

Symbian:1.8%

Blackberry OS:1.65%

█ 2000-2007: King Saipan, leading the way in the 21st century, the popularity of mobile communications and the Internet continues to accelerate, and mobile phones have become the necessities of people's lives. The rapid development of mobile phones has led to great changes in the market pattern of mobile operating systems.

Palm OS is a system based on PDA. During the PDA boom around the millennium, it had a 90 per cent share of the PDA market.

After being transplanted to the mobile phone, palm OS has also achieved some success. At that time, Sony, Qualcomm and Handspring (which was later acquired by palm) were all palm OS users.

In 2002, Palm OS 5 was officially released and began to support ARM processors.

Later, as the phone became stronger, the PDA went down and the palm began to decline.

Let's take a look at BlackBerry OS.

In March 2002, RIM officially launched BlackBerry 5810. This is RIM's first handheld device that supports GSM and GPRS. It also heralded the beginning of the BlackBerry golden age.

The BlackBerry 5810BlackBerry 5810 is a very alternative phone that needs to be plugged into headphones to make a phone call. A year later, 6710 built-in audio hardware to solve the problem.

Later, RIM launched several classic models one after another, gradually turning BlackBerry into a high-end mobile phone brand aimed at "professional consumers."

The biggest feature of the BlackBerry is its QWERTY keyboard design, which can be said to be unique. Its system security is also one of the main reasons why users choose it.

BlackBerry users were very cool at that time. Let's focus on Symbian.

Symbian was established to integrate the operating system of PDA and mobile devices. It is actually an alliance of European manufacturers, representing the interests of Nokia, Ericsson and other manufacturers.

Symbian system is a real-time, multitasking 32-bit operating system, which has the characteristics of low power consumption and low memory consumption, so it is very suitable for mobile devices such as mobile phones.

Nokia and Ericsson regarded Symbian as their main development platform from the very beginning.

The Ericsson R380 smartphone, released in November 2000, was the first device to be released with EPOC Release 5.1. The Nokia 9210 Communicator smartphone released during the same period is considered to be the first smartphone with Symbian OS.

NOKIA 9210 CommunicatorSymbian S40 platform, mainly functional machines.

In June 2001, Symbian released the Symbian S60 (Series60) platform, mainly for smartphones. It is generally believed that S60 is the most widely used version of Symbian system, which can be called a generation classic.

In 2004, Nokia, in its heyday, acquired 31.1% of Symbian (worth about 135.7 million pounds) held by Psion, bringing its stake to 63.3%, giving it full control.

Soon after, Symbian OS v8.0 was officially released.

In 2004, Symbian also made an important decision. In October of this year, they announced that they would cooperate with Intel to develop a new mobile platform for 3G mobile chips based on Symbian OS and Intel Xscale technology.

This platform, called Maemo, is the predecessor of the later Meego system.

In 2005, Symbian OS v9.0 and Symbian S60 3rd Edition were released, taking the Symbian user experience to a whole new level. This year, the cumulative global Symbian OS operating system mobile phone shipments reached 19.2 million.

Symbian continued to advance by leaps and bounds in 2006. This year, shipments of Symbian smartphones reached 100m, with a market share approaching 70 per cent.

In 2007, Symbian reached its peak, shipping more than 200 million units.

Let's take a look at Microsoft's Windows mobile system. In the second quarter of 2000, Microsoft Windows CE finally officially broke away from its dependence on Windows 95 and became a brand new system. This system supports x86, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS and other types of processors, which is very suitable for mobile devices.

At that time, Microsoft changed the name of Windows CE to Windows Pocket PC, which is what we often call PPC.

In 2003, Microsoft developed Pocket Phone Edition and Windows Powered SmartPhone operating systems. Later, Microsoft integrated these systems into PPC.

On June 23, 2003, Microsoft officially launched Windows Mobile 2003 (originally named Pocket PC 2003, based on the Windows CE 4.x kernel).

In May 2005, Microsoft released the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system for the PDA and smartphone markets. A large number of companies have adopted Windows Mobile, including Motorola, which withdrew from Symbian Alliance, Sony Ericsson after the merger, and ZTE and Huawei from China.

In a nutshell, Symbian was the absolute leader in 2006, with Windows Mobile and BlackBerry OS taking second place. Palm OS, for example, is on the decline.

Comparison of market share in the second quarter of 2006

Symbian:60.14%

Palm OS:12.52%

Windows Mobile:9.43%

Blackberry OS:7.99%

At a time when the major forces are fighting each other, a great change is about to happen.

This great change will not only completely change the pattern of the mobile phone market, but also bring human mobile communications into a new era.

Please look forward to the next episode.

The ups and downs of Mobile operating system (part two): the rise of iOS and Android

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: fresh Jujube classroom (ID:xzclasscom), author: Xiaozaojun

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