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> Before the iPhone, the only smartphones anyone really had were Blackberrys Because the US sucked for mobile phones until Apple beat the providers into submis
by rospaya 5y ago
> Before the iPhone, the only smartphones anyone really had were Blackberrys
Because the US sucked for mobile phones until Apple beat the providers into submission. The rest of the world used Nokia or Sony Ericsson smartphones that had multitasking, apps, web browsers and any other definition of a smartphone.
That's not counting Palm, Windows Mobile and others.
- jimbokun 5y agoMoving to an on screen keyboard in exchange for more screen real estate when not typing was a big market risk. Not everyone was convinced that consumers would prefer that to a physical keyboard. Palm had it's stylus and simplified hand writing recognition, which was also a very different approach.
- raldi 5y agoHow many of them had a keyless multitouch interface before 2007?
- kuschku 5y agoQuite a few, LG even won design awards for their multitouch keyless phones with app store before the iPhone was released.
- raldi 5y agoIf there were "quite a few", could you name one? If you're alluding to the LG Prada, it didn't have multitouch — no pinch zooming, no flick scrolling, etc.
- kuschku 5y agoThe LG Prada and the other phones which later led to the KP500/501 and similar phones (I had them as teen) had semi-multitouch. It could handle two fingers, as long as one of them stayed in place and only the other one moved. That’s how it implemented something kinda like pinch zooming and scrolling. Android in fact copied the same method for its early touchscreen devices and supported it until relatively recently.
- mushyhammer 5y agoI love how conversations conveniently slide off just to argue about stuff. The comment said "invented the modern slab-of-glass smartphone industry". That's it, that's true, there was no "slab-of-glass" smartphone industry. The comment did not say "invented the smartphone industry" — all comments after it are just unrelated. Yes there was there were smartphones 10 years prior. No they were not slabs of glass.
- raldi 5y agoIndeed. Particularly the bit about how pre-iPhone products met "any other definition of a smartphone". To me, multitouch is the sine qua non of a smartphone.
- samatman 5y agoHey, thanks for parsing my sentence correctly. That's been an issue in some of the replies.
- endisneigh 5y agopeople have amazingly poor reading comprehension lol
- rospaya 5y agoYou are still missing a huge point with Blackberry, which was the part I responded to.
- rospaya 5y agoNot related at all to what I quoted and responded to. Also not a prerequisite for being a smartphone. It's what's inside, not outside.
- raldi 5y agoI think if you grabbed someone off the street and handed them a phone that didn't scroll when they dragged their finger across the screen, and then asked if they considered it a smartphone, the overwhelming majority of such people would say no. But you and I can disagree on that prediction.
- rospaya 5y agoYou may be right about that, but a smartphone had a definition back in the day. There were touchscreens on non-smartphones and there were smartphones without a touchscreen, it's the software that makes it smart, not the hardware, whatever the man on the street says. The US didn't get the penetration the rest of the world had by Nokia and others so you folks had a raw deal and shitty carrier-neutered phones until Apple came along. (also I think you once helped me recover my reddit account over IRC like 10 years ago so thanks if that was you)