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The announcement of the iPhone was big because it really defined what a smartphone is. Also with the phones we have it’s easy to think that it was a small annou

The announcement of the iPhone was big because it really defined what a smartphone is. Also with the phones we have it’s easy to think that it was a small announcement which is a testament to the influence it has. The competition focused on prioritizing phone features and then adding apps that worked on a small screen. The purpose of a screen on a phone wasn’t emphasized at all. Also having a camera with a large screen eventually made the iPhone take the most pictures of any device. But the iPhone did have its price slashed by around $200. Also it took til the iPhone 5 to have a great deal of people to adopt the iPhone. So the announcement and the iPhone itself made it influential and then a few revisions later the iPhone really became dominant.

rbanffy 5y ago
> it really defined what a smartphone is What a smartphone should do was pretty solidified by then. I used a Sony Ericsson one back then and we had Palm and Windows CE devices as well. What the iPhone has shown was a UX that didn't try to mimic a computer - it was its own thing, with animated transitions and multi-touch. This made all other smartphones look clunky in comparison. The second revolution Apple introduced (later) was the app store. It extended the zero-pain experience of iTunes to applications - no more downloading .prc files and opening them with a custom tool. With the iPhone it was easy. Also, the integration with OSX apps didn't hurt either - it made the Mac and the iPhone a mostly seamless continuum.
- kube-system 5y ago
  In retrospect, it defined what smartphones were in terms of market. Before 2007, smartphones were business devices. They weren't marketed to the general consumer, and if you walked into a phone store, they were mostly ignored unless you were a "business person". The high end of consumer phones were "multimedia phones", like the Razr, which was the best seller at that time. This is partially a result of smartphone design at the time. They were, in design (and sometimes literally), PDAs with phone functionality added. It was assumed that this paradigm was the correct one. Consumers were asking for 'iPod-like' phones at the time, and manufacturers responded by making mp3 player hybrid phones like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Chocolate_(VX8500) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Chocolate_(VX8500) We now know that this approach was too literal -- too feature based. What consumers actually wanted wasn't an mp3 player glued to a phone, it was smartphone that was designed for non-business use cases first -- one that wasn't a PDA. At the time, there was actually a lot of commentary that the iPhone was destined to fail: it ignored what was then seen as the most important parts of building a smartphone at the time, being able to integrate into business communication systems: e.g. Blackberry Enterprise Server or Exchange ActiveSync.

rbanffy 5y ago

> it really defined what a smartphone is What a smartphone should do was pretty solidified by then. I used a Sony Ericsson one back then and we had Palm and Windows CE devices as well. What the iPhone has shown was a UX that didn't try to mimic a computer - it was its own thing, with animated transitions and multi-touch. This made all other smartphones look clunky in comparison. The second revolution Apple introduced (later) was the app store. It extended the zero-pain experience of iTunes to applications - no more downloading .prc files and opening them with a custom tool. With the iPhone it was easy. Also, the integration with OSX apps didn't hurt either - it made the Mac and the iPhone a mostly seamless continuum.

kube-system 5y ago
In retrospect, it defined what smartphones were in terms of market. Before 2007, smartphones were business devices. They weren't marketed to the general consumer, and if you walked into a phone store, they were mostly ignored unless you were a "business person". The high end of consumer phones were "multimedia phones", like the Razr, which was the best seller at that time. This is partially a result of smartphone design at the time. They were, in design (and sometimes literally), PDAs with phone functionality added. It was assumed that this paradigm was the correct one. Consumers were asking for 'iPod-like' phones at the time, and manufacturers responded by making mp3 player hybrid phones like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Chocolate_(VX8500) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Chocolate_(VX8500) We now know that this approach was too literal -- too feature based. What consumers actually wanted wasn't an mp3 player glued to a phone, it was smartphone that was designed for non-business use cases first -- one that wasn't a PDA. At the time, there was actually a lot of commentary that the iPhone was destined to fail: it ignored what was then seen as the most important parts of building a smartphone at the time, being able to integrate into business communication systems: e.g. Blackberry Enterprise Server or Exchange ActiveSync.