Smartphone touchscreen device with a slide-out physical keyboard. The first Android device, the HTC Dream, was released in September 2008. Although Android's adoption was relatively slow at first, it started gaining widespread popularity in 2010, and in early 2012 dominated the smartphone market share worldwide, which continues to this day. Android and iPhone devices popularized the smartphone form factor based on a large capacitive touchscreen, and led to the decline of earlier, keyboard- and keypad-focused platforms. Microsoft, for instance, discontinued Windows Mobile and started a new touchscreen-oriented OS from scratch, called Windows Phone. Nokia abandoned Symbian and partnered with Microsoft to
Windows Phone 8 WP8, Kantar reported in October 2013 that Windows Phone grew its market share substantially to 4.8% in the United States and 10.2% in Europe. Similar statistics from Gartner for Q3 2013 indicated that Windows Phone's global market share increased 123% from the same period in 2012 to 3.6%. In Q1 2014 IDC reported that global market share of Windows Phone has dropped to 2.7%. Windows Phone 8 Windows Phone 8 is the second generation of the Windows Phone mobile operating system from Microsoft. It was released on October 29, 2012, and like its predecessor, it features a flat user interface