Consumer Products Award Winner 2010

Steve Jobs is co-founder and chief executive of Apple Computer. He also involves himself in the intimate details of all product design and development and thus leads the team that creates Apple products.

Apple released its version of a smartphone, the iPhone, in June, 2007 in the United States and 270,000 were sold in the first 30 hours. In July, 2008, Apple released the faster and cheaper iPhone 3G in 22 countries and sold one million in the first three days on the market. It introduced the faster 3GS in June, 2009

The iPhone has proved popular because of multiple features such as its Multi-Touch screen interface, accelerometer, embedded GPS, real-time 3D graphics, and 3D positional audio. Of those, the factor that most ignited popularity among consumers was the multi-touch screen, which enables user to control all functions with their fingers. The screen senses touch using electrical fields, transmits that information to the LCD screen below it and software enables users to open, close and move among applications, zoom in or zoom out by flicking, tapping or pinching their fingers.

The iPhone is not just a phone but a platform. Apple inserted a working version of its OS X operating system so the phone could handle robust computer applications such as web browsers and e-mail clients. In addition, it has the features of Apple’s iPod music and video player.

Apple eventually permitted developers outside the company to develop applications for distribution at its App Store, part of its highly popular and successful iTunes online store. As of April, 2010, the App Store offered more than 185,000 applications for the iPhone written by more than 28,000 developers.

More than 4 billion apps. some free, some for sale, had been downloaded as of April, 2010.  Apple provides 70% of revenues from an application sold in the store to the software developer and while that may have contributed tens of millions of dollars to its sales, it’s not a huge revenue generator given the size of the company. More importantly, the wide diversity of the applications has increased the functionality of the iPhone, contributing to its enviable consumer popularity. Apple had sold more than 51 million iPhones as of March 31, 2010. Market watcher IDC said Apple’s iPhone was the third-best selling smartphone in 2009 with a 14.4% share of the market as sales for the year soared 82%.

In response to the popularity of the App Store, this integrated service has been imitated and now is being offered by other mobile platforms, such as the BlackBerry, Palm, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform; and Nokia.

Apple followed up the success of the iPhone with the launch in April 2010 of its iPad tablet computer. Apple sold 300,000 the day of its launch and 2 million within two months. Designed to fit in a new category between a smartphone and a laptop computer, it is optimized for high-speed Internet browsing, gaming, viewing videos, reading books or other media, and light typing while in a living room or on the go. Like the iPhone, it uses either a WiFi or a 3G data connection to the Internet and its 25cm display is controlled by fingertip motions. Users can download applications in the AppStore.