4 ms·

It's really useful to look at the context of the market at the time. High-end phones ran a mobile variant of Windows, or were Blackberries. Screen sizes were ge

by bane 5y ago

It's really useful to look at the context of the market at the time. High-end phones ran a mobile variant of Windows, or were Blackberries. Screen sizes were getting larger and having data coming to your phone at all was still considered a bit exotic but was starting to happen. Touch, if there was any, was usually on a non-capacitive screen and was generally pretty terrible. The integration of sensors, data, GPS, etc. was starting to happen, but wasn't ubiquitous. The market was also incredibly fragmented both on the hardware and software side. The hard divide between feature phones and smart phones hadn't yet been delineated in a general sense (the Windows phones were just kind of clunky and weird, and Blackberry basically had it's own market segment and represented "smart phones" in the press). Phones just kept getting higher and higher end, and adding more and more features. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/best-mobile-phones-of-2006/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/best-mobile-phones-of-2006/ The most anticipated phone for 2007 was Nokia's N95, the press called it a "multimedia device". It came with GPS, quad-band, 5MP camera, Wi-Fi connectivity, an accelerometer, a Web Browser, a big screen, apps. It looks vaguely like an older iPod, but has a pop out numeric keyboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 At the time it was considered one of the best phones ever released and sold 10 million. At the time it was sometimes called smartphone, but I think today we'd call it an advanced feature phone. Android thus came out in this market, and the phones it originally targeted looked more like the N95 than the iPhone. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they rethought the form-factor and simplified it, getting rid of most buttons and making touch not suck. But functionality-wise the iPhone was about on par with the N95, and so was Android. However, the first iPhone didn't support user apps, had limited connectivity and sold only 6.1 million devices. When Android started supporting phones with iPhone-like form factors, it wasn't a given that it would become the predominant form factor for phones. The first few generations of Android phones still features lots of vestigial keyboards and buttons and rollers and sliders and such carried over from the N95 and blackberry style phones that Android devices were also looking like. Once the iPhone style form factor started leaving everybody else in the dust, Android phones (and the OS) simply dropped that stuff also.

Izkata 5y ago
> and the OS At least as of Android 8, the OS still supports hardware keyboards (and likely the rest); my current phone has one and can scroll by swiping on the keyboard.
majormajor 5y ago
The high-end Symbian phones ticked all the boxes for "smart" I can think of. Not sure how they'd get bucketed as "feature phones." Browser, apps, fast cellular, GPS, camera... several things (like local filesystem management and access for apps) considerably before the iPhone. It was all just a bit of a pain to DO. Mount on a PC, copy video or ebook files over to certain directories, operate through the numeric keypad, etc... the cumulative friction of all that compared to the iPhone was pretty groundbreaking even if it in a lot of ways it was just a lot of things being "a little bit" easier. But I still held on to it for a few years because it took a while for the iPhones to really be able to do all the same things.
- ufmace 5y ago
  It's the app ecossystem that really changed things and makes a true smartphone. Symbian could technically install and run apps. I think there was a Nokia/Symbian app store, but it only had like 10 crappy apps. I never had any idea where you would even start if you wanted to build one of your own or get it on the store. I'm pretty sure even power users of those phone never had more than one or two aftermarket apps. Rumor was that the development experience was terrible. I used Symbian phones for like 10 years I think, and never saw any improvement whatsoever in the app situation. Apple and Google now both run app store hosting millions of apps, they both maintain their own development environments and adopted more advanced languages to make it easier. It's easy to submit apps (relative to Symbian days) and even nontechnical users commonly install and use dozens of them. The development tech and available APIs are being added and improved at breakneck speed, relatively speaking.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    One other thing that played a huge part is how Jobs beat AT&T over the head to provide an unlimited data plan. We don't think much of this today, but in those days data was expensive. It put a huge cognitive load on any kind of data operation. Merely turning on the data modem was a "will I be able to eat through payday" kind of decision. It was very stressful! And suddenly Jobs comes along with the cool new phone AND takes away this barrier. Now you could have data always on, not worry about how big the app was you were about to download. You could browse the web and go to any website, with images turned on, without fear. I remember the day this was announced and even though I never bought into the Apple ecosystem I remember feeling that it was a game changing move.

by bane 5y ago

Izkata 5y ago

> and the OS At least as of Android 8, the OS still supports hardware keyboards (and likely the rest); my current phone has one and can scroll by swiping on the keyboard.

majormajor 5y ago

The high-end Symbian phones ticked all the boxes for "smart" I can think of. Not sure how they'd get bucketed as "feature phones." Browser, apps, fast cellular, GPS, camera... several things (like local filesystem management and access for apps) considerably before the iPhone. It was all just a bit of a pain to DO. Mount on a PC, copy video or ebook files over to certain directories, operate through the numeric keypad, etc... the cumulative friction of all that compared to the iPhone was pretty groundbreaking even if it in a lot of ways it was just a lot of things being "a little bit" easier. But I still held on to it for a few years because it took a while for the iPhones to really be able to do all the same things.

ufmace 5y ago
It's the app ecossystem that really changed things and makes a true smartphone. Symbian could technically install and run apps. I think there was a Nokia/Symbian app store, but it only had like 10 crappy apps. I never had any idea where you would even start if you wanted to build one of your own or get it on the store. I'm pretty sure even power users of those phone never had more than one or two aftermarket apps. Rumor was that the development experience was terrible. I used Symbian phones for like 10 years I think, and never saw any improvement whatsoever in the app situation. Apple and Google now both run app store hosting millions of apps, they both maintain their own development environments and adopted more advanced languages to make it easier. It's easy to submit apps (relative to Symbian days) and even nontechnical users commonly install and use dozens of them. The development tech and available APIs are being added and improved at breakneck speed, relatively speaking.
- foobarian 5y ago
  One other thing that played a huge part is how Jobs beat AT&T over the head to provide an unlimited data plan. We don't think much of this today, but in those days data was expensive. It put a huge cognitive load on any kind of data operation. Merely turning on the data modem was a "will I be able to eat through payday" kind of decision. It was very stressful! And suddenly Jobs comes along with the cool new phone AND takes away this barrier. Now you could have data always on, not worry about how big the app was you were about to download. You could browse the web and go to any website, with images turned on, without fear. I remember the day this was announced and even though I never bought into the Apple ecosystem I remember feeling that it was a game changing move.