Established on April 1 1976, Apple Inc. has become one of the world’s most respected companies. At its inception, Apple was called Apple Computers Inc. and concentrated solely on its line of personal computers. But after studying the consumer electronics market for almost 30 years, it decided to drop the ‘Computers’ from its name and concentrate on expanding into related markets.

Since then, Apple has come out with products like the iPod, iPhone, MacBook Pro and the iPad which have catapulted the company to glory and raked in billions of dollars. Recently Apple’s market cap exceeded that of Microsoft fir the first time since 1989. The iPhone in particular, has been instrumental in changing the fortune of Apple and has made Apple the word’s third largest mobile phone supplier.

The original iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs at the Macworld Conference & Expo in January 2007. It operated on a 2.5G quad band GSM network and ran a scaled down version of Apple’s own Mac OS X (iPhoneOS). Apart from running applications that also ran on Mac OS X, the phone also ran apps like – Google Maps and Safari. The iPhone featured a 3.5inch wide display and came with different memory options (4, 8 or 16 GB). Connectivity options included Bluetooth and WiFi.

The iPhone 3G was announced on June 9, 2008. The phone could support 3G networking and had GPS navigation. The phone came with various upgraded, the most appreciated of which were the change of the recessed jack to flush jack to make the phone compatible with different styles of headphones and the launch of the Apple App store which allowed users to simply download applications for the iPhone by just logging on to the internet. One year later the Apple iPhone 3GS was announced which had some new features like video recording capability and voice control. It also supported faster 3G speeds.

Apple finally announced its much anticipated Apple iPhone 4 on June 7, 2010, at WWDC 2010. The phone is said to be Apple’s biggest leap since the original iPhone and has a host of new features and improves upon some of the existing ones. The phone comes in an all new design which has never before featured on the iPhone. The display screen shows a stunning resolution of 960 x 640 pixels that provides a viewing experience four times better than that of 3G. The new A4 processor enables multi tasking and the gyroscope allows enhanced gaming. The phone also has a 5MP camera with LED flash and the front facing VGA camera allows video calling. Cheap Apple iPhone deals can be found at numerous online mobile shops and are available from all major service providers like Vodafone, Orange, O2, Tmobile, Three and Virgin.