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> the first iPhone was really bad I couldn't disagree more. Sure looking back at what we have today it is easy to laugh at it but it was literally the only pro

> the first iPhone was really bad I couldn't disagree more. Sure looking back at what we have today it is easy to laugh at it but it was literally the only product of its kind for perhaps the first 9 months of its life. It delivered on pretty much everything IMHO. It was reliable and it performed well. It really did replace an iPod, phone and PDA with one device. Honestly the only thing it lacked was copy and paste which I agree was dumb but never did I think it was "really bad" because of this omission. People can rag on Apple for a lot of stuff but man they really killed it with completely new gen 1 device. Not even the iPod was as good a gen 1 device as it lacked PC compatibility, a physical wheel that could/would break, etc. It took at minimum a year for any other phone maker to bring something even 50% as good as the iPhone to the market and it took them several years to match (and exceed) it. I'm not saying the first iPhone was perfect, obviously it was not. There is still not perfect smartphone. However it was a great product and I feel calling it "really bad" is very unjust.

untog 7y ago
Well, the OP's full line was "very bad but with a good user interface", which IMO is an important caveat. In every category except user interface the first iPhone was behind the times. Devices like the Nokia N95 could do everything the iPhone could do, plus a lot more, with great (for the time!) performance. But it's also a demonstration of why UI matters so much. I was using a Symbian smartphone and loved it but none of my friends did because it wasn't as intuitive as the dumb phones of the time. iPhones were as intuitive as a dumb phone and had a whole raft of new features... but only when compared to those dumb phones.
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  One thing the N95 and almost every other phone back then didn't have was a decent 3D accelerator like the PowerVR chipsets in the first iPhones. So ya, it's UI, but most other phones were physically incapable of translating touch events into 60fps graphics like the smooth scrolling lists or mobile Safari's zooming interface. Phones that did have PowerVR or something equivalent at the time didn't have a 3D accelerated double buffered GUI baked into the OS like what Apple had already developed for OS X.
- satysin 7y ago
  Fair point however as someone moving from a Nokia N95 to the original iPhone I recall things very differently. While it is true the N95 could do a lot more than the first iPhone I hated using the N95 and iOS, while more limiting, was a breath of fresh air compared to the horrible S60 operating system on the N95. I have vivid memories of getting frustrated with all Symbian smartphones, the N95 included. It was clunky and horrible to work with. To me that shows just how good the first iPhone, and iOS, was. Even though it had no third party apps and was missing some common features it was so much more enjoyable to use that it made up for those short comings. I tried for years to find a good "smartphone" (for the time). Palm, BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson, etc. I tried using a dedicated PDA (Palm Tungsten, etc) with GPRS(!) over bluetooth to a reliable phone (Nokia 6310i) and all that but it was still a horrible experience. Not because of the some what hacky ways you had to get things to work properly (that was a get it working and you were done one off) but because it never felt like good to actually use. Inputting data was awkward with a stylus, the UIs were poorly designed with no real thought put into users workflow for common tasks. Switching between apps was slow and you lose context or worse would lose what you had already input! Then one day I had an iPhone in my hand and it did almost everything I wanted. It had a really good (for the time) mobile web experience, years ahead of any other platform. A great audio player with their iPod platform. The best YouTube and mobile video experience out there. A maps app you could actually use without wanting smart the phone. A solid email, calendar and contacts package. Adapting to the on screen keyboard is easy for me, sure it felt different but I could never relate to people who kept talking about how they could never give up their BlackBerry with its "proper" keyboard. I hated those tiny physical keyboards. From sending my first SMS on an iPhone I knew I never wanted to use a phone with actual buttons again. So yes the user experience was incredible on iOS compared to everything else before it however I stand by my reply that OP is being unfair to say it was "very bad but with a good user interface" because to me, and I am confident many others, that user interface is what defined the iPhone as being so good. Every other phone was instantly horrible to me because they didn't have such a good user experience. It didn't matter if some other phone had an hour long battery life or apps or a better camera or copy and paste. Every other phone had a garbage user experience which made it a worse phone.

untog 7y ago

Well, the OP's full line was "very bad but with a good user interface", which IMO is an important caveat. In every category except user interface the first iPhone was behind the times. Devices like the Nokia N95 could do everything the iPhone could do, plus a lot more, with great (for the time!) performance. But it's also a demonstration of why UI matters so much. I was using a Symbian smartphone and loved it but none of my friends did because it wasn't as intuitive as the dumb phones of the time. iPhones were as intuitive as a dumb phone and had a whole raft of new features... but only when compared to those dumb phones.

CoolGuySteve 7y ago
One thing the N95 and almost every other phone back then didn't have was a decent 3D accelerator like the PowerVR chipsets in the first iPhones. So ya, it's UI, but most other phones were physically incapable of translating touch events into 60fps graphics like the smooth scrolling lists or mobile Safari's zooming interface. Phones that did have PowerVR or something equivalent at the time didn't have a 3D accelerated double buffered GUI baked into the OS like what Apple had already developed for OS X.
satysin 7y ago
Fair point however as someone moving from a Nokia N95 to the original iPhone I recall things very differently. While it is true the N95 could do a lot more than the first iPhone I hated using the N95 and iOS, while more limiting, was a breath of fresh air compared to the horrible S60 operating system on the N95. I have vivid memories of getting frustrated with all Symbian smartphones, the N95 included. It was clunky and horrible to work with. To me that shows just how good the first iPhone, and iOS, was. Even though it had no third party apps and was missing some common features it was so much more enjoyable to use that it made up for those short comings. I tried for years to find a good "smartphone" (for the time). Palm, BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson, etc. I tried using a dedicated PDA (Palm Tungsten, etc) with GPRS(!) over bluetooth to a reliable phone (Nokia 6310i) and all that but it was still a horrible experience. Not because of the some what hacky ways you had to get things to work properly (that was a get it working and you were done one off) but because it never felt like good to actually use. Inputting data was awkward with a stylus, the UIs were poorly designed with no real thought put into users workflow for common tasks. Switching between apps was slow and you lose context or worse would lose what you had already input! Then one day I had an iPhone in my hand and it did almost everything I wanted. It had a really good (for the time) mobile web experience, years ahead of any other platform. A great audio player with their iPod platform. The best YouTube and mobile video experience out there. A maps app you could actually use without wanting smart the phone. A solid email, calendar and contacts package. Adapting to the on screen keyboard is easy for me, sure it felt different but I could never relate to people who kept talking about how they could never give up their BlackBerry with its "proper" keyboard. I hated those tiny physical keyboards. From sending my first SMS on an iPhone I knew I never wanted to use a phone with actual buttons again. So yes the user experience was incredible on iOS compared to everything else before it however I stand by my reply that OP is being unfair to say it was "very bad but with a good user interface" because to me, and I am confident many others, that user interface is what defined the iPhone as being so good. Every other phone was instantly horrible to me because they didn't have such a good user experience. It didn't matter if some other phone had an hour long battery life or apps or a better camera or copy and paste. Every other phone had a garbage user experience which made it a worse phone.