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Great excerpt. Except, it ignores the fact that there were smartphones, touchscreens, app stores, MP3's on phones way before the iPhone. It's a very American p

Great excerpt. Except, it ignores the fact that there were smartphones, touchscreens, app stores, MP3's on phones way before the iPhone. It's a very American point of view, since Nokia never made a lot of progress with their smartphones in the US, like Blackberry did, and their phones were strickly email and business. I had a touchscreen phone that could hold hours of video or hundreds of songs, send instant messages, browse the web, get apps, use WiFi... In 2004. In 2005 you could alreday get GPS, more versatile hardware and better accessories. The iPhone did a huge cultural change, and pushed UI and apps into the future. But pretending that it was the first one to make icons like phones today use or that it created the first computer-phone like the excerpt says - is nonsense.

MBCook 9y ago
It was the first MODERN smartphone phone, in that it defined everything that came after. The ford Model-T wasn't the first car, but in many ways it defined what we're all used to (controls changed though) and was a breakthrough product that sold WAY better than what was available before. The iPhone with such a large shift from the things that existed before that even though they had many of the features in different forms, it's a bit hard to look at them and say "that's the same thing as a smartphone" instead of "that's a really fancy feature phone" or "that's a PDA with a radio stuck on it".
pinaceae 9y ago
touchscreen as in stylus or touchscreen as in finger?
valuearb 9y ago
No you didn't. If it required a stylus they blew it.
nailer 9y ago
It's like full Pol Pot year zero: > The software engineers saw P2 not as a chance to build a phone, but as an opportunity to use a phone-shaped device as a Trojan horse for a much more complex kind of mobile computer. Do they mean... a PDA? Apple's execution and OS is amazing but the idea they invented mobile computing is insane. Palm created that market, then Windows Mobile did, then Apple did, then Android did.
- dpark 9y ago
  The percentage of the population with a PDA was effectively zero before the iPhone created the market. People carrying Moto Qs were a geeky elite. Apple made this mainstream. RIM was closest but even they missed the real market with their focus on email and physical keyboards.

MBCook 9y ago

It was the first MODERN smartphone phone, in that it defined everything that came after. The ford Model-T wasn't the first car, but in many ways it defined what we're all used to (controls changed though) and was a breakthrough product that sold WAY better than what was available before. The iPhone with such a large shift from the things that existed before that even though they had many of the features in different forms, it's a bit hard to look at them and say "that's the same thing as a smartphone" instead of "that's a really fancy feature phone" or "that's a PDA with a radio stuck on it".

pinaceae 9y ago

touchscreen as in stylus or touchscreen as in finger?

valuearb 9y ago

No you didn't. If it required a stylus they blew it.

nailer 9y ago

It's like full Pol Pot year zero: > The software engineers saw P2 not as a chance to build a phone, but as an opportunity to use a phone-shaped device as a Trojan horse for a much more complex kind of mobile computer. Do they mean... a PDA? Apple's execution and OS is amazing but the idea they invented mobile computing is insane. Palm created that market, then Windows Mobile did, then Apple did, then Android did.

dpark 9y ago
The percentage of the population with a PDA was effectively zero before the iPhone created the market. People carrying Moto Qs were a geeky elite. Apple made this mainstream. RIM was closest but even they missed the real market with their focus on email and physical keyboards.