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| ▲ | dmonitor 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Considering practically every smartphone to this day is derivative of the 2007 glass slab hardware design (and software UX), I'd say they were on to something even if it didn't launch with the App Store immediately. |
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| ▲ | npunt 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I went from a Palm Treo to the iPhone in 2007, these devices were not in the same league. Years apart in all aspects. I had an external box for tomtom gps on the treo and a janky mp3 player and some crappy apps on a resistive touch screen that looked like it had a permanent hazy film over it as all resistive ones do. The apps part was rectified pretty quickly but even the kind of halfway decent web apps available after iPhone launch beat treo apps. |
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| ▲ | djtango 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not an apple fanboy but they were the first to really understand and solve touch screen phones - they went with capacitive tech when everyone was doing resistive and they went all-in on the UX and studied how touch should feel and how the UI should reflect it. They were by no means the first smartphone nor were they the first touch phone but the "iphone moment" was coined because they figured out how to make frontier tech mainstream. They also weren't the first to make an MP3 player but it sure felt that way with the ipod. I don't know how people have rewritten this history in their minds | |
| ▲ | b112 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is true, but I felt the same with the HTC Dream, although I guess Apple was first, they were more than a year apart. I don't miss typing 'reboot\n' in any app, or at any time, and the phone rebooting, because the first release had a left-open root session. So the Android polish wasn't quite there on release either. |
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| ▲ | argsnd 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Your older Palm device was almost certainly much worse at browsing the web both in fidelity and interactivity. Loading a full desktop website on a device that small and being able to pinch to zoom in to sections was pretty novel at the time. |
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| ▲ | Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah arguably the biggest innovation the iPhone had was the capacitive touch screen - they weren't the first (that was the LG Prada) and the various interactions like pinch zooming and inertial scrolling were done before, but they did have a 2004 patent on capacitive multi-touch screens. | | |
| ▲ | djtango 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm so glad someone else remembers and values their contributions here. That full package of capacitive touch, a UI and UX optimised for touch, inertial scrolling with pinch and zoom came together to form something much greater than the sum of the individual parts: an experience that could convince you to part with physical buttons Also I think it took me almost a decade to find a touch keyboard (fleksy) I liked as much as the iOS keyboard. I think people also take for granted how far ahead their quiet innovations in the touch keyboard were without fanfare. The ones in 2007 were unusable, the original android ones were terrible and I didn't much like swiftkey. Google Keyboard came much later but lacked some of the smoothing and tappiness of the Apple one | |
| ▲ | tomduncalf 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah as I recall it, the iPhone was the first device where touch felt really natural and fun. They nailed that feeling that you’re actually interacting directly with what is under your finger. Previous touch devices I tried felt kind of disconnected because they hadn’t sweated the details in the same way. | | |
| ▲ | ffsm8 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | thats a very different narrative though. but this discussion always has the tendency to go completely off teh rails because there are so many people unable to talk rationally about apple products. innovation basically never happens in a vacuum, and especially apple products have historically "come second" into a product category -- and just nail the implementation so well that they just felt great to use.
(and yes, smartphones were well established by the time the iphone was released. thats what i'd call the product category there. dialing in to ever narrower definitions to make it into a "new" category is exactly the reason why this can never be settled - because you can call _every_ product a new product category like that) So now we got endless discussions about "who was first" even though its completely meaningless to ask this question -- because that "previous product" also took inspiration from other products, and if you squinted enough, could also be called "just an iteration" vs a "innovation". | | |
| ▲ | JoBrad 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s not really a different narrative, though: They started with the idea that the phone should be nearly all screen (which was very controversial at the time) and designed the software around that. No one had a UI or UX that was as fully committed to this idea as the iPhone, although they certainly got inspiration from others. You’re right that Apple isn’t usually a first mover within a product segment. But that have a tendency to nail what they consider to be a better execution of that product. |
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| ▲ | f6v 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nokia was dominating the smartphone market when iPhone was released. There was no ecosystem there. All these "pocket PC" devices were very cool for their time, but they were really really far from mass market adoption. |
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| ▲ | yoz-y 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There was the “sweet solution” :) When reading the stories about how the first iPhone came to be, had they tried to also have an sdk with the first release, it would not have shipped on time. And although Jobs was famously stubborn, this is something he changed his mind quite quickly on. In no small part due to the ecosystem that popped up despite him thanks to jailbreaking. |
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| ▲ | phoghed 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And on the other side of that argument are people lamenting that it didn’t stay web app centric with PWAs and whatnot |
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| ▲ | b112 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| an ecosystem of apps To be fair here, you're replying to a thread where people were discussing mechanical engineering, and hardware. Not software. Held to that metric, the software layer isn't part of the original discussion. Not saying that discussing other things is wrong, but the comment you replied to seems to be "The hardware was an enormous cut above". |
