2011: A reality bite into hits and misses

MUMBAI, INDIA: Unarguably, the year 2011 can be marked as the year of smartphones and tablets — where every company tried to test their hands in the smartphone and tablet markets. However, not many left their mark during the year except few, which were successful to set standards in the technology world.

It was Apple to set the ball rolling in the technology world at the start of 2011. The company got a fabulous response with over a million apps downloads from the Mac App Store in the first day itself that gave the confidence and sense of what the world was expecting from Apple.

To set the competition tone in the smartphone and tablet world, Apple first launched its most awaited iPhone 4 by teaming up with Verizon, followed by iPad2 across 25 countries. Powered by the success of iPhone4 and iPad2, Apple went a step ahead to give a power punch by introducing iCloud — the free new cloud services for applications across company's various products.

For Apple it was a superb journey from start into the mid-year with launch of new products and applications that strongly reflected in company's third quarter results with record breaking revenue of $28.57 billion and $7.31 billion net profit.

Amid the rising popularity and growing business, Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive officer, announced his resignation from the top post in August due to his prolonged illness. It was a big shock for the company as well as for the fans of Apple products all over the world.

In just over a month's time since announcing his resignation, Jobs died at his Palo Alto home at the age of 56. The charismatic innovative leader of the computer and technology world passed away and left behind Apple's legacy of innovative products that always inspire other companies.

Others follow suit

In fact, Apple's legacy of innovative products such as smartphones and tablets have already been watched closely, exploited and even challenged across markets by other technology companies such as Samsung, Research In Motion (RIM) and others.

While Apple was speeding to enhance and make advancements in operating systems of its iPhones and iPads, the South Korean electronics giant Samsung was not far behind to grab the market opportunities with its Android-based Galaxy range smartphones and tablets where Apple made a late entry.

Samsung compared to Apple was much swifter in launching the Galaxy series to wide markets. Apple's selective market approach gave ample time and chance to Samsung in creating a strong competition and rivalry against the US-based firm in the smartphones and tablets space.

The growing competition and rivalry reached to such a level that both companies filed counter patent infringement lawsuits to ban sales in some countries. Despite the on-going legal battle, both Apple and Samsung remained among the top tech giants dominating the smartphones and tablets market globally in 2011.

In contrast to the head-to-head competition between Apple and Samsung, Canadian firm Research In Motion (RIM), which was once considered as a market leader in the smartphone space with its BlackBerry phones lost its ground drastically.

For RIM, this was the year of never ending woes that included the several national governments' demanding the access to de-encryptions of emails and servers. In fact, India and many middle-east countries threatened to ban BlackBerry services due to security reasons.

It was not just the security concerns of those countries, but also RIM's own rigidness in abiding with those governments' demands and reaching to amicable solutions, backfired on company's image and business.

In an attempt to regain the market grip against Apple and Samsung, RIM launched Playbook — the tablet PC. However, Playbook failed to take off in a big way as RIM had expected, leaving its investors and shareholders annoyed.

To make it worse, RIM's email and messaging services suffered major technical glitches across globe disrupting its services for many days. This caused big slump in RIM's stock price this year. Currently, the share price reached as low as $15 since 2004, which is far below its book value.

RIM, once considered a great innovative company, is seen as a sinking ship. And given the company's poor sales and revenues, speculations and rumors already are doing media rounds -- Amazon trying to buy RIM!

Amid the closing story of RIM, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook — the social networking site made a big mark in 2011 by attracting over 70 million users globally, quite enough to impress investors. The social networking site is slated to file IPO next year. However, Facebook's big attempt to take on Gmail, Yahoomail and Hotmail didn't take off well and vanished unnoticed during the year.

Twitter, the micro blogging site with over 100 million users, has already got investors backing. Recently, Saudi billionaire Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding announced a $300 million investment in Twitter, which is yet to hit the IPO, that has already been valued close to $8 billion.

While majority of 2011 belonged to technology product companies like Apple and Samsung, the tablet PC market attracted many other companies too such as Dell, Motorola, Lenovo, Amazon, ASUS and HP. But most of them struggled to penetrate the market and heat up the competition due to the price barriers.

However, Canadian firm DataWind left mark on the Indian and other markets with its low cost tablet. DataWind's Android-based Aakash priced at $35 saw a quick boost with Indian government's support, which is thriving to provide tablets to students and educational institutions.