Comment by antirez

5 days ago

Do you realize that the smartphone revolution started here with Nokia?

Well.. ish. But really it started with iPhone. I've used those Nokia "smartphones". They were less the start of the smartphone revolution than PalmPilot or the IBM PC.

  • It didn't start with the iPhone. What the iPhone brought was a different interface and user experience.

    For the rest, Nokia's "dumb phones" already had MP3 players and all sorts of media (games, videos), downloadable apps, access to the internet, photos, and video recording. They only lacked touch interfaces.

    Of course, this was done along with other manufacturers like Sony Ericson, Motorola, Samsung etc.

    The behavior of people walking around with media in their phones and using their phones to consume media, capture media and access the internet on-the-go was built by those brands, not by the iPhone.

    And this demand and behavior wasn't built with anything like Palm Pilots or the IBM PC, but with regular popular phones - for example, the Motorola Razr line, the Nokia Xpress line, and the Sony Ericson Walkman were products that were launched around 2003-2006, which built these social behaviors.

    Things like capturing photos/video, sharing photos and music, and playing multiplayer games were the standard thing to do in my teens with these devices. I only got my first modern smartphone around 2012/2013.

    It's undeniable that the iPhone broke the mold with its user interface and experience, which became the standard for UI/UX, but the demand and consumer behavior weren't built by Apple, not even close. They just surfed the wave with a better product.

    • > It didn't start with the iPhone.

      Disagree, but continue...

      > What the iPhone brought was a different interface and user experience

      Lol. Yea, that's 99% of the entire thing! It's why Android was building a Nokia clone the day before the keynote, and the day after the keynote they changed direction HARD in panic.

      > They only lacked touch interfaces.

      Well that's not true. They did in fact have touch interfaces too. Just that it wasn't capacitive. And the entire interaction model sucked, the APIs sucked, the graphics sucked, the screen sucked, etc.

      > The behavior of people walking around with media in their phones and using their phones to consume media, capture media and access the internet on-the-go was built by those brands, not by the iPhone.

      I think you're also forgetting what "the internet" on these devices was. It wasn't the real internet. You couldn't go to normal full websites and have it worked. It was enormously far from it in fact.

      > but the demand and consumer behavior weren't built by Apple, not even close. They just surfed the wave with a better product.

      There was no wave before BECAUSE the products before were so inferior.

      It's maddening that people don't get this. The difference between utter crap and a great product isn't checkboxes on a feature list. It's a thousand tiny details that seem insignificant, and CARING about those things.

      If it was just a few UX fixes, Nokia could have turned around and cloned iPhone fast. But they couldn't. Because:

      1. They didn't care or understand tiny details.

      2. Many many details is something you build up over a long time. You can slap a clone UX over your existing product, but that's not why the iPhone was great.

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