Articles tagged "Counterclockwise"

Last week we told you about Oppo, so this week we want to talk about its sibling company, vivo. While Oppo was founded in 2004, vivo is even younger - it was founded in 2009 and released its first phone in 2012. The company hails from Dongguan, a...

Oppo began life in 2004 and in the early days it made its name by selling high-quality Blu-ray players, amplifiers and headphones. Its entry into the phone business came in 2012, quite late in the game. Still, the company grew quickly, becoming...

Huawei is currently the largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, but it is a very young company - it was only founded in 1987. And it didn't start making phones until 2003, but it already has ambitions to be the largest smartphone maker...

Last week we went through the first chapters of the Apple iPhone chronicles and now we'll bring you the rest of its story. Powers of 2 Ads for the Atari Jaguar made a big deal about it being the first 64-bit video game console. How is 64-bit...

Apple went from a garage, to an influential computer brand, to the brink of bankruptcy, to being the biggest tech company in the world. Many books have been written about it and we’ve talked about it plenty of times. We’ve traced Apple’s history...

All chat clients these days have "delivered" and "seen" labels to reassure you that your message reached its intended recipient. But what if getting the message delivered was literally a matter of life and death? Enter Research in Motion or as it...

Xiaomi is one of the youngest smartphone companies, but its rise has been astounding. It was founded in 2010, released its first phone in 2011 and in 2014 it was already the top maker in China. The first product the company made was MIUI ("Me You...

James Bond is known for being a suave spy, but he loves his gadgets. Provided by Q, these often include an Aston Martin and a Sony Ericsson phone. It started with the Ericsson JB988, a fictional phone featured in Tomorrow Never Dies (it's the phone...

Seoul, South Korea is home to two tech rivals - LG and Samsung. While the latter is the larger company, LG has also brought plenty of innovation in tech even if it often goes underappreciated. So, let us tell you its story and see if you gain more...

Last year HTC celebrated its 20th birthday. The company was founded in Taiwan on May 15 1997 as the High Tech Computer Corporation and it initially intended to build laptops. Pretty soon it started building pocketable devices - Pocket PCs as they...

I still remember the first time I saw a Siemens ME45 - a black phone with amber lighting and it was water, shock and dust resistant. It was like a stealthy bat-phone. The ME45 internals are identical to the Siemens S45, the company's first...

Motorola is famous for making the first commercial cell phone - the DynaTAC. It also created the first ever flip phone, the Motorola StarTAC. The company has scored many more firsts in its 90 years of existence, enjoyed a golden age when it shaped...

BlackBerry phones (PDAs first) got their name because of their distinctive keyboards - the keys were arranged in a way that resembled the fruit. But let's not look at a straight up QWERTY keyboards or even how the keyboard slides or rotates out of...

The Apple App Store just turned 10, a year after the iPhone got into the double digits. That’s because the App Store was introduced with iOS v2.0 (actually, it was iPhone OS back then). So, this is a good moment to talk about how app stores came to...

A couple of weeks ago we look at weird ways to mount a phone's camera. That inspired us to dive into weird form factors this week. Phone form factors generally fall into four categories - static, slider, flip and swivel. Static is the simplest,...

SIM – the Subscriber Identity Module – is an ever-shrinking card that acts as your access pass to the carrier’s cell network. Once it was used to store your phone book and text messages, now it’s under threat of extinction. Embedded SIM solutions...

The word “selfie” was the Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2013, but the practice is much older than that. Much older – many consider the first selfie to be this photo of Robert Cornelius from 1839. Years later, cameras came to phones and...

During the 70s and 80s there was an explosion of processor architectures, many of which found their way to smartphone chipsets. ARM, which traces its roots back to the 1981 BBC Micro, clearly won the game but it faced competition in the past. Intel...

Mobile OSes went through a Cambrian explosion and then there was an inevitable mass extinction. The two survivors – Android and iOS – date back to 2007 and they completely dominate the field. Android is on 9 in 10 phones while iOS lives in...

Other than Sony (which owns a movie studio), smartphones and movies don’t have much of an overlap. That was the case until a major push from studios tried to make 3D movies popular. Which led phone makers to attempt to bring 3D to your pocket. In...