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"Smartphone" was a thing long before first iphone. You're right about rendering normal websites being revolutionary, though. Pretty much all smartphones before

"Smartphone" was a thing long before first iphone. You're right about rendering normal websites being revolutionary, though. Pretty much all smartphones before that only displayed (relatively rare) WAP/WML sites. Those were pain to both use and make: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol#...

Firmwarrior 4y ago
Those pages were friggin awesome when I used them in Korea and Japan though. WAP in Japan was way better than the full web on an iPhone in 2008, anyway. I don't think the USA really caught up until 2010 or so
usrusr 4y ago
That wasn't the demarcation line either: late feature phones (when they were already called that, because smartphones were very much a thing already) had surprisingly capable browsers (and Wi-Fi, and GPS, and external memory). I already became a web community addict on my Sony Elm. The difference was all about user-installable apps beyond what was offered by J2ME, since what already felt like eons ago. Post-iPhone that demarcation got muddled a bit by touch-driven UI and the occasional touchscreen feature-phone will be considered a basic "smartphone" by many, but in the historical context when that distinction still mattered it was all about the installables, and J2ME did not count. PS: neighbor poster reminds us that the iPhone at first did not have user installable apps either, I guess that could be seen as muddling my demarcation line even more. But on the other hand the reality was that when it happened, the iPhone was so much a standout that nobody really cared where it would fit in the emerging field of mobile phone classifications, it was just The iPhone. And iirc "smartphone" as a term wasn't quite as established as we like to think it was, the conceptual bound were more clear than the name. When "smartphone" eventually emerged as the definitive shared superclass of iPhones and Android devices it inherited almost accidentally (and there's-an-app-for-that era Apple did not try too hard pointing out that inaccuracy...)
jeroenhd 4y ago
I used a PDA for a phone and that was pretty much a smart phone but slightly thicker. I didn't get the hype about the iPhone because all the fancy features it had just seemed to be on my phone already. Mobile websites went through a phase where everything looked like iPhone menus for a while and that was often quite annoying because I was used to just reading normal web pages, even if they were often slow. I think the iPhone made an important change in that it was significantly more powerful (and expensive!) than most phones people used. These devices were out there and they had been for years, but Apple normalised spending ever increasing sums of money on a phone.

Firmwarrior 4y ago

Those pages were friggin awesome when I used them in Korea and Japan though. WAP in Japan was way better than the full web on an iPhone in 2008, anyway. I don't think the USA really caught up until 2010 or so

usrusr 4y ago

That wasn't the demarcation line either: late feature phones (when they were already called that, because smartphones were very much a thing already) had surprisingly capable browsers (and Wi-Fi, and GPS, and external memory). I already became a web community addict on my Sony Elm. The difference was all about user-installable apps beyond what was offered by J2ME, since what already felt like eons ago. Post-iPhone that demarcation got muddled a bit by touch-driven UI and the occasional touchscreen feature-phone will be considered a basic "smartphone" by many, but in the historical context when that distinction still mattered it was all about the installables, and J2ME did not count. PS: neighbor poster reminds us that the iPhone at first did not have user installable apps either, I guess that could be seen as muddling my demarcation line even more. But on the other hand the reality was that when it happened, the iPhone was so much a standout that nobody really cared where it would fit in the emerging field of mobile phone classifications, it was just The iPhone. And iirc "smartphone" as a term wasn't quite as established as we like to think it was, the conceptual bound were more clear than the name. When "smartphone" eventually emerged as the definitive shared superclass of iPhones and Android devices it inherited almost accidentally (and there's-an-app-for-that era Apple did not try too hard pointing out that inaccuracy...)

jeroenhd 4y ago

I used a PDA for a phone and that was pretty much a smart phone but slightly thicker. I didn't get the hype about the iPhone because all the fancy features it had just seemed to be on my phone already. Mobile websites went through a phase where everything looked like iPhone menus for a while and that was often quite annoying because I was used to just reading normal web pages, even if they were often slow. I think the iPhone made an important change in that it was significantly more powerful (and expensive!) than most phones people used. These devices were out there and they had been for years, but Apple normalised spending ever increasing sums of money on a phone.