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My iRiver H340 was ahead of its time. It supported MP3 and Ogg Vorbis and had 40 GB, while the iPods of around that time were running around with 4 GB. Oh, and
by Fnoord 7y ago
My iRiver H340 was ahead of its time. It supported MP3 and Ogg Vorbis and had 40 GB, while the iPods of around that time were running around with 4 GB. Oh, and iTunes DRM.
I bought an iPod Classic later on (with 160 GB) to experience the genius usability of the iPod. Except, I didn't experience it.
The major innovation of the iPhone was that it had a capacitive touch UI (which allows finger use, gestures, etc). The iPhone did not have an App Store during release. It was missing a lot of features. It was Nokia who was the market leader around that point. I wish they fully bet on Maemo and capacitive touch instead of Windows Phone (they went the right way with the N9, but the predecessors were still too much on pen and resistive touch, or hybrid).
Right now, it is oddly enough Jolla who have a partly proprietary, partly FOSS, Linux-based OS (SFOS) for which you need a paid license for. After that, they won't track you though. The iPhone would've never sustained a big pie of the smartphone market though; it is Android which killed Nokia. Official SFOS has Android emulation.
- freepor 7y agoI had a Nokia N95 when I first used an iPhone. It was clear within 5 minutes of using the iPhone that regardless of specs the iPhone was a vastly better experience. That’s how Apple defines “best” and the market has demonstrated that a huge chunk of the market agrees with them and will pay the price for it.
- nomel 7y agoWhy was this downvoted? The first thing I thought of was the iRiver. It was incredible at the time.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Fnoord 7y agoBecause on HN it is allowed to downvote based on disagreement, and it is a thread about how well Apple is currently doing.
- dkonofalski 7y agoReplies like this miss the point completely. The iPod wasn't aimed at people like you who know what Ogg Vorbis is/was. It was aimed at the average, non-techy person and it absolutely crushed it. Same with the iPhone. The major innovation of the iPhone was that it was simple to use and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it.
- Fnoord 7y agoExcept the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. Then there was the need for jailbreaking to get some basic features back. Ever since Web 2.0 it was clear to me that a touch-based UI would win if you used a web browser; it was Apple's capacitive touch UI which was the killer feature. Nobody had such even though Mozilla was experimenting already with a mobile browser (Fennec). (For some use-cases, a keyboard is still desirable though. E.g. a Pebble during sports is better usable than a touch-based smartwatch.) You don't need to know what Ogg Vorbis is; I knew because I ripped my CDs to Ogg Vorbis. I already paid for these. It allowed me to save even more space compared to MP3 and AAC.
- dkonofalski 7y ago>It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. None of these things, in any way, take away from how simple the first iPhone was to use. Once again, you missed the point completely.
- Fnoord 7y agoIt was limited in its usage (terrible speed while 3G was widely available, limited applications while Symbian had these, could not update via repositories which my Nokia N-series could, could not even use a comm feature like MMS). Apple got away with it because of their iPod fame, and that the UI was a decent capacitive touch-based one which nobody else managed to do.
- elsonrodriguez 7y agoThe iRiver H340 came out in 2004, the iPod came out in 2001. Apple basically had the world's entire supply of tiny hard drives on lock for a year or two, after that other players could finally compete in that form factor (contemporary MP3 players either had little storage or were almost walkman sized).