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.
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