10 Phones From The 2010s That Define Smartphone History (But Aren’t iPhone Or Android)

Source Domain: www.slashgear.com

The smartphone market is essentially a duopoly these days, with Android and iPhone as the only two major camps available. Sure, there’s a lot of variety in the Android space, but these phones all use the same basic operating system, for better or worse, and inherit many of the decisions that Google’s engineers bake into the Android Open Source Project that underpins Android. But this wasn’t always the case.

Smartphone buyers of the late 2000s and 2010s had many more operating systems to choose from, including a range of Windows Phone devices and even the odd BlackBerry and Palm smartphone or two. Of course, the fact that you can’t buy phones running on these operating systems anymore — the Windows-capable NexPhone doesn’t count — says a lot about how well they did (or didn’t do), but that doesn’t change the fact that they still left a mark on smartphone history as we know it.

Whether it was massive, ahead-of-its-time camera sensors or the debut of a now-ubiquitous display technology, the 2010s were a truly exciting time for smartphones. And while Android and iPhones justifiably get the lion’s share of retrospective attention, these alternatives show that there’s a lot more to the history of smartphones than the big names we’re likely all familiar with.

Nokia 808 PureView

The notion that a higher-megapixel sensor automatically makes for better photos is definitely one of the many phone camera myths we would do well to stop believing, but that doesn’t mean that megapixels are entirely meaningless, either. More pixels allow for more detail, and the undisputed megapixel king of the early…

Source