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.