Comment by HarHarVeryFunny
7 months ago
Xerox created the GUI, and much of modern computing, but Jobs/Apple certainly deserve credit for the smartphone.
Before the iPhone the phone market was primarily "feature phones" - flip phones with a keyboard and a few built-in JavaScript apps. The Blackberry wasn't much different - just a better keyboard with a focus on messaging/business use.
The iPhone was quite radical - masterfully presented as an iPod, phone, and internet communications device, before revealing that they were all capabilities of the same device.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4
The effect on the phone market was immediate, and turned the market upside down. It was basically the end of Nokia who had been dominant up to that point, and caused everyone else to scrap current plans and go back to the drawing board, realizing that this new pocket-computer smartphone concept, with it's large touch screen interface was obviously the future.
The smartphone is nothing more than a merge of a traditional cell phone (what we now call "feature phone") and a PDA. Such a merge would happen sooner or later, either with PDAs acquiring the ability to also act as cell phones, or with cell phones gaining the ability to also act as PDAs. Apple might have accelerated that change, but it was inevitable.
I don't think that framing really gives enough credit to how novel the iPhone was, and how it shook up the market when it was introduced.
Yes, PDAs had already been a thing for a long time (Psion Organizer), and Apple themselves had experimented with this category too with the Newton, before the Palm Pilot then became so dominant.
What was novel about the smart phone - really it's defining characteristic, was it wasn't a primarily single purpose device like a PDA, or phone, or MP-3 player/iPod, or camera, or handheld web browser, but rather a universal hand held computer/communications device, and one whose functionality was not limited to what you got out of the box. The large touch screen, with gesture-based UI, was also quite novel, and a large part of what made it successful and generic.
It's easy to look in the rear view mirror and say that most inventions/innovations were inevitable and just a product of their times, but the iPhone was quite shocking when first launched and did shake up the industry - nobody was expecting it, or expecting how popular such a device would be. Steve Ballmer famously laughed at the iPhone after it's launch and questioned who would want it, given the high cost and lack of a keyboard (a feature, not a deficit!).. and then of course went on to try unsuccessfully to copy it.
> What was novel about the smart phone - really it's defining characteristic, was it wasn't a primarily single purpose device like a PDA, or phone, or MP-3 player/iPod, or camera, or handheld web browser, but rather a universal hand held computer/communications device, and one whose functionality was not limited to what you got out of the box.
I used a Palm PDA back in the pre-iPhone days. Its functionality was not "limited to what you got out of the box", you could install applications on it. I have fond memories of exchanging Palm applications with my friends through its infrared port. I used it as a PDA, MP3 player, camera, to play games, and even as a handheld web browser (it didn't come with a web browser, it was one of the applications I installed), using a Bluetooth connection to my cell phone for the network access. The only thing it couldn't do, was making phone calls; for that, I used that cell phone on my other pocket. That's the defining characteristic of a smartphone: being a phone which can do all the things a PDA could already do.
> and questioned who would want it, given the high cost and lack of a keyboard (a feature, not a deficit!).
That Palm PDA also lacked a keyboard. It was designed to be used without a keyboard, and worked pretty well, with either the stylus or the on-screen keyboard (which was usable even without the stylus). So it was not a given that the lack of a keyboard would be a deficit.
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