By Parag Agarwal
Edited by Namrata Caleb
The smartphone war has been going on for a very long time now with two of the biggest players being Apple Inc. and Samsung. Apple always had the upper hand due to its wide range of application and its user-friendly interface. Samsung on the other hand had to come up with various strategies like different phones in different segments, niche markets and different OSs to come up to the standard of Apple. The original Samsung UI was prominent amongst its Corby series which generated profits, but not too much. Seeing this, Samsung designed its own Operating System called Bada and launched it with its phone Samsung Wave which sold not for the OS but the features of Wave. Seeing the falling sales, Samsung signed a contract with Google and adopted the Android OS and launched its first ever android phone, the Galaxy S, whereon began the true war.
September 2011, Steve Jobs the CEO of Apple once again created a revolution to change the way smartphones were perceived with his last brainchild to the world, the voice assistant in his flagship series the iPhone 4S with the name of siri. Siri gained popularity, boosted the sales of the iPhone by a huge margin with people lining up in front of the Apple store the night before the launch. The other features of the 4S were not given much attention by the consumer consumed by the excitement of being able to control every feature on the phone with one voice command with the help of Siri who is not only responsive, but also accurate and came with different accent recognitions to serve the needs of Apple fans across the globe.
To counter this, in its flagship S series, Samsung launched the S-Voice with its phone Samsung Galaxy S3 in August 2012, while replacing the original Google Talk that was present in all Android-run devices, which lead legal proceedings from Apple. Over the years, Siri and S-Voice have both developed tremendously increasing responsiveness and accuracy.
Microsoft ventured its computer OS Windows in phones using the Nokia Lumia series. Though the sales were not great initially, the updated helped boost profits too. Microsofts flagship gaming series Halo on their gaming console X-Box has a huge fan-base for its amazing gameplay and the artificial intelligence character, Cortana. Microsoft is introducing Cortana in its new Windows 8.1 phones as a virtual voice assistant.
Cortana comes with a lot of features missing in Siri and S-Voice. For example, Cortana has music recognition which in the former two need third-party application such as Shazam. The Windows store comes with an app called the Notebook which stores all your personal data. Cortana can read through it, analyze it and understand your needs better, so it actually learns more as you fill in more.
The already established fan-base for Cortana is a huge plus point and will definitely boost sales as it will be made available in the Windows 10 OS too. Siri is classy and is highly efficient which leads to a great reputation. S-Voice is comparatively sloppy and needs more updates. Over the years, the war between smartphones has broadened to smart watches, tablets, phablets (phone + tablets) and laptops. Cortana will revolutionize the smartphone market as Microsoft has promised independent updates to it, irrespective of the Windows version which is a great deal.
Parag Agarwal is a 17 years old, doing the IB Diploma Program from SVKM International School. His hobbies are reading, writing. He maintains a blog, which he writes at shadowblog01.blogspot.in. He plays squash and soccer at times. He is not a party person and prefers staying at home and reading a book.