Comment by alkonaut
2 days ago
That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing.
We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephone in the old sense of the word (For younger readers, "telephone" used to mean a thing you made calls with).
The fact we pay 2-3 times as much now for premium smartphones is no wonder. Now it's a PC power thing with a better camera. By the time the iPhone 3G arrived it was a marvel. It had ironed out most of the kinks of the early versions, added the GPS, App Store etc. But by then, the other dinosaurs were already dying. They murdered them with the initial versions of the iPhone, which really weren't even that impressive.
The presentation shows they were aware of what was happening. But that Nokia didn't just make their portfolio two lines (really simple cheap feature phones and really expensive all-glass smartphones) on the day after this presentation came out, is strange.
> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it.
You glossed over the one killer feature of the original iPhone: It had a fully functional web browser and enough compute power to just barely run it. This was the thing that made all previous smartphones instantly obsolete. No goddamn WAP proxy. No needing 3-4 minutes to get Yahoo to render. It didn't completely trash the layout of every other page. It was an actually useful web browser.
As I remember it there was a time before and after 3G for web browsing. The fidelity of the iPhone Safari early on was great, but those early 2 generations didn't really have the bandwidth to do much with it. Still, I agree it was a leap ahead of the rest.
It's not unfair to say the first generation iPhone was a bit of an aspirational device. It helped a lot if you found some working public WiFi, but even then the speed wasn't entirely the fault of the radio, the processor and especially RAM on the phone hurt performance.
It's not hard to see why the iPhone 3G was a major success. It smoothed over so many of the rough edges from the original iPhone.
> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes,
I still remember seeing the demo of maps and the user being able to pan and zoom and was just floored. I really think the screen is what sold it then, even if it didn't have the apps, you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer.
IMO the screen + multi touch is what drove sales of the first iPhone.
Agree on this. As a layman in Australia, i had a friend who was coming back from the USA and asked him to buy me an iPhone before its release in AU (late-2007 iirc, iPhone 3G launched in Australia in 2008) and promptly jailbroke it so i could get it on an Australian carrier.
When i whipped it out in public, take a photo at concerts, etc. random people would come up to me and ask me to play with it -- thats when i knew for sure Apple were on to something, a complete game changer that captured the attention of the public.
> you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer.
It had the screen and the software do do that but not the bandwidth. But I guess people were more patient back then.
It had WiFi, which was rare in mobile phones back then (carriers wouldn’t generally allow it)
Oh how we forget... Phones at the time were HORRIBLE. To you, today, it looks like the iPhone couldn't do much. Back then it was revolutionary that a phone could simply render a proper website or connect to your home wifi.
The thing was all the faults with that iPhone was software. You can update software. Lack of copy & paste was a software feature that was no doubt in some product backlog for a while before getting picked up. And once it got picked up and shipped, suddenly every device people bought had that feature.
I don’t recall any of my older phones having software updates that had major new features. Any update would have been some esoteric bug fixes or something.
The idea that the phone was just another general purpose computer with an operating system that could be updated to a significantly changed interface was not a concept that existed in the mainstream at the time.
All the players before were hardware manufacturers who were deeply in bed with the carriers. Phones were locked with whatever software happened to be installed at the time. Each phone had very different software that was fixed and unchanging. The entire ecosystem was built around that and Apple came along and made that model obsolete.