> The iPhone wasn't successful because of its beautiful design. It was because it packed everything we needed every day—phone calls, music, internet, photos, maps—into a single device.
Have to disagree here. There were many devices before (and after) the iPhone that offered this package but it stands above the rest because of its design and polish.
I don't recall if the iPhone actually even had internet and maps at launch. I think the first time I saw an iPhone in person was in France maybe around 2007/2008 or something, and at that point it didn't even have the AppStore I'm fairly sure, just had the apps it came with.
And most of the discussion I had with the owner wasn't about how it was "all-in-one package", but rather how much smoother the UI was compared to other touch devices at the time, how accurate it was and how it felt in the hand.
I had the OG iPod Touch, which had the same software (minus the phone, camera, and GPS parts).
It did web browsing very well.
And it came with Maps (which, at that time, used Google's data).
It was initially amusing back then when the world was commonly filled with wide-open 802.11 networks to pull out that little pocket computer, connect to a nearby network (if it hadn't already connected to "Linksys"), and browse an online map -- from about anywhere with a building nearby.
Wifi-based geolocation was also spooky-good at that time.
Anyway, it didn't do much else that I found useful. It was generally lacking features that I'd been using for years with a Handspring Visor (which itself ran on a pair of alkaline batteries for months).
Early IOS didn't even have a clipboard to cut and paste with.
So I jailbroke it. I added multitasking, an app "store," a clipboard and a bunch of other fun stuff long before Apple allowed those functions.
I think I even had a good bit of the Debian userland installed at one point.
After that, I used it all the time for stuff (until the OG Motorola Droid replaced it in 2009, which was easy as pie to root: just dump a special su on there and run it).
When Jobs first announced the iPhone, he really sold the idea that it was running a real web browser like on a desktop. Up to that point, there was a special mobile internet that really sucked.
I remember WAP, GPRS and the newly invented 2G all too well :) But seems my memory wasn't perfect regarding a browser being on the iPhone initially or not, thanks for the correction.
I miss WAP browsing. By necessity, it stripped out all the "advanced" design bullshit that made web pages suck. Just a couple links and buttons is fast and reliable.
Yeah, me to in a way, browsing pages where every link is centered, shit quality porn ads everywhere and deep down in the pages you could finally find that .jar link to the cracked game you were out after. Trying to remember any of the WAP websites I frequented at the time, but seem to recall any by name or address...
Weirdly enough, I think a weather report website was my most frequented WAP site. And maybe Slashdot? And I guess downloading .wav clips of South Park quotes. Later on, a social media site called BrightKite, where you'd submit your location and talk to other people who'd been there, post pictures of the place (via MMS-to-Email). There wasn't a whole lot to do on the 00's internet.
> There wasn't a whole lot to do on the 00's internet
Maybe depends on the country but 00's in Sweden on the internet was OK, lots of social places and other nerdery going on that was easy to get into, granted you had an internet connection. LunarStorm (originally "Stajlplajs" I think) must have been popular around 2002 already, and I remember that from my teenage age group, most of them were signed up to Lunarstorm, even though most of us were still on modems, 240p webcams and white/yellow desktop computers.
The problem wasn't the special mobile internet but the operating systems. Most phone OS before iOS just couldn't run full Gecko/Trident/WebKit/what-have-you. The phones could reach any external IPv4 addresses, but there weren't much to do with neither browser nor an app store.
You could run things like IRC clients, dedicated text chat apps, and server rendered browsers on live Internet. But downloading full webpages was too much for the hardware.
Yeah, everybody dropped WAP like a cobalt-60 source the very moment phones became capable of rendering usual HTML
For anyone else who is unfamiliar with Wireless Markup Language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
> Building on Openwave's HDML, Nokia's "Tagged Text Markup Language" (TTML) and Ericsson's proprietary markup language for mobile content, the WAP Forum created the WML 1.1 standard in 1998. WML 2.0 was specified in 2001, but has not been widely adopted. It was an attempt at bridging WML and XHTML Basic before the WAP 2.0 spec was finalized. In the end, XHTML Mobile Profile became the markup language used in WAP 2.0.
there were also previous mobile devices with "regular" http/s browsers that also really sucked
> I don't recall if the iPhone actually even had internet and maps at launch
It did. Jobs famously said on stage [0] "An iPod, a Phone, and an Internet Communicator. An iPod, a Phone... are you getting it? These are not 3 seperate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone" at the launch. It also did come with maps that used Google Maps.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK55ElsVzxM
It had internet, back then one of the big bits of news tangential to the iphone releasing was how Jobs decided on no Flash player on their mobile devices, which was the mortal wound to official support of that format. More generally though, I think the iphone (or smartphones in general) work as a good example of bundling capabilities and doing it well. Phones before then could do many of the things smartphones could, some could play games, could play music, some had cameras, and there were separate devices that specialized in those and did them better, but smartphones collected them all up and started an arms race in doing them great.
> things smartphones could, some could play games, could play music, some had cameras, and there were separate devices that specialized in those and did them better
But even Sony Ericsson phones way before the iPhone could all do those things in one phone too, some of them really good for their time. Yet they never kind of changed the technology scene as much as the iPhone.
When I first saw the iPhone I remember thinking how silly it was that a device calling itself a "phone" only had the phone function as of many apps. Other phones had internet and other features, sure, but their "home" screen, so to speak, was a phone UI. You had to hit "Menu" or something else to see the other apps, which were clearly secondary to the primary phone function.
The iPhone felt more like a general portable computing device that happened to also function as a phone.
Even the Blackberry up to that point still felt more like an "email/phone device" primarily (though funny enough, I never had a Blackberry myself until after the iPhone came out).
The irony now, and I suspect many people are like this, is my "phone" is barely ever used as an actual phone. It's a computer with a data plan. I am way more likely to use some kind of internet-based voice/video chat than make or take a phone call.
My phone icon is still on my home screen, but only because it is something I want to be able to get at quickly in an emergency. I'm certain it's the least-used icon on the screen, though.
> Other phones had internet and other features, sure, but their "home" screen, so to speak, was a phone UI. You had to hit "Menu" or something else to see the other apps, which were clearly secondary to the primary phone function.
There were also other “phones” that only had the phone function as one of many apps.
Case in point, Safari. I used Blackberry before the iPhone as well as multiple other "mobile browsers" on PocketPC, Palm, and even WAP browsers on flip phones (maybe also Opera Mini? My memory is fuzzy on when that came out).
Nothing, and I mean nothing, compared to Safari on the iPhone. It was in a league of its own. It was dog-slow over Edge but it was a _real_ browser instead of what had come before.
agree. as a heavy user of smartphones pre-iPhone, the actually usable browser was the biggest advantage the iPhone had at introduction. I'd even put it above the capacitive/multi touch capabilities, as these did not enable new functionality but merely made it a nicer experience.
Imho the iphone could have been a literal stinking 1kg brick and as long as it kept the same UI people would carry them around on a carrying handle and it would still have been a success.
It's the usefullness, not the hardware.
Its the screen (size) that mattered. While screens make terrible input devices, for content consumption they are king. And that is the dividing line between blackberry/iphones. An argument can also be made for "boring business blackberry" vs "fun" iphone.
The apps were worse, but you had that HUGE screen to look at. And compared to other non-blackberry phones where you were limited to T9 text input, it was a game changer.
I think it was mostly the marketing.
I've seen this argument thrown around but I'm not sure I understand how it holds up. Why didn't android just completely copy apple's marketing, then? What did apple do differently,marketing wise, that android couldn't emulate?
Their whole marketing campaign was basically "You've never seen anything like this before, no one has made a phone capable of all this". You can't really copy that marketing if you're the second company making such a product unless you want to be laughed at.
There is some value to the idea as Apple was a single manufacture with a somewhat high end image vs Android being on every random company, some who were decidedly budget/low end. So we seem some real tacky advertising for Android devices vs more polished ads for iPhone. But there is more to the story than just this factor
They had a deal with AT&T with a data plan that no one else could get. It made every other what phone useless in comparison.