Comment by MBCook
5 months ago
It absolutely was on the ragged edge of viable. In the first one (and 3G) you could easily scroll a webpage faster than it could render it.
But it did what it needed enough to be extremely compelling. And it improved very fast in the early years.
I remember streaming Pandora in summer of 2008 and thinking how amazing is it that I can listen to whatever music I want on the go. And it got better and better by the week, it seemed. I don’t recall ever having issues with insufficient bandwidth, almost everything I expected to work, worked when I needed it to (in NYC).
It wasn’t long before we had Maps, Latitude, Yelp, Four Square, Twitter, so many possibilities due to combo of camera + mobile broadband + GPS + battery technology to allow on the go computation and communication.