7 ms·

The second Apple debuted that smooth as fucking butter interface it was clear as day how badly behind people were at the time. Pre-iPhone the form of phones was

The second Apple debuted that smooth as fucking butter interface it was clear as day how badly behind people were at the time. Pre-iPhone the form of phones was incredible but the function was dogshit garbage. Small displays rendering everything in software and failing to hit 15fps on a good day because these poor little ARM chips were being abused to within an inch of their lives. If you were seriously lucky you might get blitting in hardware. Then iPhone comes in with a high spec ARM, a GPU, and Core Graphics. If I was Nokia/SE/Motorola I would have been shitting myself watching Steve demo the iPhone knowing that I'm at least five years behind now.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
I once read an interview with Anssi Vanjoki, who was one of the top executives at Nokia. He said indeed that when he first held an iPhone he knew it was over for Nokia. If I remember correctly, Nokia had good tech for smart phones, but no vision or courage to drive the market in that direction. It was not a well-managed company.
- Veliladon 3y ago
  That's the problem with being an established market leader. You're so terrified of blowing up your own market that you're afraid to disrupt with innovation.
  - gumby 3y ago
    This is the topic of the famous book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (one of the three or four business books actually worth reading, and unfortunately also the source of the overused word “disruption” in business)
    - snwt 3y ago
      Could you by any chance list the other books? Just finished reading The Innovator's Dilemma. Phenomenal read.
      - gumby 3y ago
        Two other important ones for entrepreneurs: - “Crossing the Chasm” in the end this book is really just a single drawing, but the text explains the problem: why early traction not only doesn’t imply future growth, but if misunderstood, can kill any future growth. Also very important for investors and people at big companies. - I really like the underrated “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation” by Utterback. It’s kind of a complement to the other two, full of amazing market hacks to get a new product established. For example, 120 years ago, electric companies would put on demo sessions for the public, so the gas companies would send people with metal bars in their sleeves to short out the electrical systems (in a cloud of sparks of course!). So Edison (IIRC) got the clever idea to run the electric wiring through the gas conduit, both “for safety” and to take the gas out of service. We often don’t understand what the true characteristics and affordances of a new technology are — and neither do the customers. That’s what this book is about.
        snwt 3y ago
        Thank you for the recommendation. I got into a rut in terms of just doing programming and reading technical content about a year ago. So, I started reading from a list of books mentioned in various HN posts. As I slowly make my way through the list, I feel both like an idiot for not having read these books earlier, and at the same time thoroughly happy that there are such beautiful concepts out there to learn that's not just programming or systems design. Hadn't heard about the Utterback one! Seems like it would be right up my alley.
- macintux 3y ago
  People have often indicated we would have consolidated on iPhone-like devices in Apple’s absence, but I’m not convinced. Apple was unique: they were willing to bet the company on a single form factor, they had a small but loyal and vocal fan base, and they had their own retail stores to give people the opportunity to experience the phone. Anyone else would have made it just one of a half dozen phones and it would have languished in a dusty corner of one of the crappy operator stores where no one knew how to use it or had any reason to push it.
  - jakobson14 3y ago
    Read up on handspring. Their phone was the full modern smartphone years before the iphone. They're the ones who met with Larry Page and got him to make a mobile version of Google.com. Jobs met with handspring back when apple was focused on the mac PC. Jobs stood up at the whiteboard and drew a mac with all the aspects of a person's life around it. Handspring's CEO or CTO stood up and drew a handspring phone and all the same photos, music, www, etc around it. "Except you'll carry this with you everywhere you go." It was at that moment jobs realized he needed to build a phone and what it needed to look like. Thing is, while handspring got there ~5 years before jobs did, they didn't have anything to leverage. They were a small startup and completely at the mercy of the telco carriers with their existing cellular subscribers, who then proceeded to force changes to the interface and apps. Handspring actually had to risk it all on their vision of what a phone should be. Jobs had a healthy apple with a healthy mac computer lineup and billions in the bank. When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way. Handed the concept and executed with essentially zero risk.
    - jolux 3y ago
      > When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way That's actually not true, all of the telcos rejected the pitch except AT&T. There was considerable risk in it from their perspective, because Apple wanted total control over the user experience: no carrier logos on the handset, no carrier logos in the operating system, no preinstalled carrier software.
- smugma 3y ago
  I have a cousin who still fondly talks about how great Nokia was in its heyday. Great engineers, leading edge hardware and innovation, leading supply chain, etc. It’s always weird to hear. He blamed Nokia’s inability to come up with a decent mobile OS and get behind it. Horace Dediu has written a lot about both Apple and Nokia. I recall him saying Nokia did some things really well. I think they were caught totally flat footed, and the Symbian debacle did them in
- bandergirl 3y ago
  Nokia had vision and creativity, don’t forget the N-Gage, the first phone/smartphone/console hybrid. I think it just lacked in software investment. Nobody thought it was necessary or even possible to deliver that kind of experience on phones. The iPhone came out when Windows XP was the default PC experience for most of the world, why would anyone need anything like iPhoneOS on a damn phone? Talk about overkill.
- foobarian 3y ago
  There was some fancy 6 inch or so Nokia PDA from around that time that was supposed to be amazing. It had all the good hacker features - it ran Linux, it had driver support, you could ssh from it, etc. I remember turning it on and seeing kernel printk logs scrolling, followed by the plain X cross-thatch, and then some home grown window manager where you had to use a stylus to move the mouse cursor to click on stuff. That kinda summed up Nokia for me, developing 80s tech in the 2000s.
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    Their S60 phones were based on Symbian and had a web browser based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore at the end of 2005. By all accounts they were good, hackable, general-purpose mobile devices. Then Steven Elop left Microsoft to become Nokia CEO; decided to move everything to Windows Phone; publicly pointed out everything was on fire; crashed the stock price by 85%; sold Nokia to Microsoft at a massive discount; and then finally rejoined Microsoft. If it wasn’t an act of corporate sabotage designed to obtain Microsoft an established phone vendor subsidiary at a fraction of its cost, then it’s hard to see how he could have done a better job on purpose.
    - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
      Well, Nokia also got a good chunk of cash for the phones division, and it didn't exactly turn into a cash cow for MS. So, maybe Nokia got the better end of that stick in the end.
macintux 3y ago
I don’t recall the precise details, but one of the key Android people was watching the keynote and had that immediate realization: their prototypes had just been obsoleted.
- haunter 3y ago
  This was the original Android demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg
  - macintux 3y ago
    That was a year later IIRC.
- bonestamp2 3y ago
  Yep, their prototype was more like a BlackBerry than an iPhone and they immediately had to switch gears and make one like the iPhone instead: https://www.androidpolice.com/first-android-prototype-google-sooner-phone-hands-on/ https://www.androidpolice.com/first-android-prototype-google...
ajross 3y ago
It was a lot less of a paradigm shift at the time than it seems like in hindsight, actually. In fact there were competing phones with Windows Mobile or Symbian that did have similar hardware specs. (Really if you have to pick the single defining hardware innovation of the iPhone, it was the full slate capacitative touchscreen.) And in some areas the iPhone was clearly behind, shipping with a EDGE-only radio at a time where other networks were rapidly deploying 3G hardware. But the big missing bit was the app store, which didn't exist yet. When the iPhone shipped, it was a very expensive phone with a web browser, and nothing else. Jobs was going on stage saying that web apps were all anyone needed, and people were laughing at him. When the app store was finally released it only barely beat Android to market. It wasn't really until the 3G/3GS generation that the product really hit its stride, and a few more revs after that before it became the sine qua non accessory for the tech set. In hindsight, yeah, that was a huge inflection point. But at the time there were a lot of reasons to prefer other devices.
- wrs 3y ago
  The iPhone was a software innovation that was years ahead of the industry at the time, enabled by that one hardware innovation that you’re sounding rather dismissive of.
  - ajross 3y ago
    I don't think I'm "dismissing" anything. I replied to a comment that made what I think is an incorrect point about how the product was received at release. It's too easy to take a successful product and mythologize its origins, when in fact history was complicated and in a lot of ways the early iPhone kinda sucked. Again, there were existing app ecosystems on Symbian/Nokia and Windows, and none of that stuff, or anything like it, ran on an iPhone. You couldn't even get your email on the device outside of a handful of open source web clients (its inability to run the gmail client was a big hole, heavily reported at the time).
    - wrs 3y ago
      The early iPhone sucked in ways similar to how the early iPod sucked, and was received with similar reactions. In both cases, the folks who predicted failure focused too much on the technical deficiencies of the V1 product and not enough on the game-changing difference in approach. In the iPhone’s case that meant betting fully on a multitouch screen with a rich, smoothly animated GUI, and wresting software control away from the carriers. I think the latter in particular was not sufficiently appreciated.
Seanambers 3y ago
It's hard to overstate just how big of a leap the iPhone was. Critics only focused on the shortcomings but neglected to see what it really was. Steve Jobs Introducing at Macworld in 2007 is a classic for the ages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg
- ayewo 3y ago
  I remember a lot of tech reporters were quick to mock the iPhone for not supporting a feature they all took for granted: copy and paste.
  - goodlinks 3y ago
    3g and wifi hotspot were another two big ones (edit: that made me stick with the somewhat ridiculous htc/windows i was using) iirc *edit: i say ridiculous as the iphone still made it look totally crap
    - jochem9 3y ago
      3g came in the second gen iPhone (called iPhone 3G; afaik there has never been an iPhone 2). Only edge when outside wifi range was actually a huge downside of the first gen. It was sub par to the phone I had back then (Nokia N95). I only adopted the iPhone when it got 3g.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    These types of "tech reporters" are appropriately and brilliantly mocked in SNL's "iPhone workers" skit: https://youtu.be/AJJ353epH3o https://youtu.be/AJJ353epH3o. Point being, it's fine to say "sure, it's missing cut-and-paste, but not hard to see how that's a really insignificant nit for most people that will easily be addressed in a subsequent software update," but all too often I see tech reporters latch on to some relatively small detail that they try to make a huge brouhaha over because they have nothing better to say.
  - cjbgkagh 3y ago
    Copy and paste was the reason I remember being bandied around inside MS at the time. I made the point that I was sure they could figure out cut and paste before we could figure out everything else. Other phones like O2 had capacitive touch but you couldn’t design a whole interface around it as it was very expensive and hardly anyone had it. Apple went in big and got it to price point people could afford. It saw it as clearly game changing, but being young and nieve I overestimated the ability for other companies to effectively compete even when they could see a model of what works.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I remember 2 audience reactions really, really clearly from the original iPhone launch: 1. the reactions to "flick to scroll". 2. reaction to pinch-to-zoom. In both cases the audience was just gobsmacked: oohs, ahs and cheers all around. For people saying there were other devices out there at the time with similar or better hardware specs, or even comparable feature sets, I think you are totally missing the point. That kind of comparison is making the same mistake as the infamous "Less space than a Nomad. Lame" Slashdot comment re the iPod. I remember trying out the original iPhone the second day it was on sale, and just being blown away - and I worked in the mobile industry at the time and was well aware of the features of other phones. The overall experience of the iPhone was just legions ahead of anything else that existed at that time.
- indigoabstract 3y ago
  Yes, there were already phones with touchscreens before the iPhone, but they were all using a stylus, which seemed a better choice than a finger at the time, since they were more precise. But after the iPhone came out, it quickly became obvious how much better it was to use a screen with a finger with multi-touch than with a stylus. Steve or whoever made the decisions about the iPhone obviously knew very well what they were going for and 100% deserve the success.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    Those stylus touchscreen phones had a 640x480 or an 800x600 resolution and a full web browser. They could use basically any web site on the internet. The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version. I figured that access to the entire web was a killer feature that would let the clunkier stylus phones compete successfully with an iPhone. Not a prediction that aged well.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      > The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version. That's just totally wrong. In fact, IIRC the original iPhone announcement showed a visit to the NY Times website to show how you could scroll around and zoom "full screen" websites. If anything, the ability to navigate "desktop" sites on the iPhone was much better than other phones because those other versions of "full web browser" were clunky incarnations that made it difficult to zoom in and scroll around. It was pinch and double tap to zoom, and finger-on-screen to scroll that made browsing sites on the "normal" web much better than anything else at the time.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago

I once read an interview with Anssi Vanjoki, who was one of the top executives at Nokia. He said indeed that when he first held an iPhone he knew it was over for Nokia. If I remember correctly, Nokia had good tech for smart phones, but no vision or courage to drive the market in that direction. It was not a well-managed company.

Veliladon 3y ago
That's the problem with being an established market leader. You're so terrified of blowing up your own market that you're afraid to disrupt with innovation.
- gumby 3y ago
  This is the topic of the famous book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (one of the three or four business books actually worth reading, and unfortunately also the source of the overused word “disruption” in business)
  - snwt 3y ago
    Could you by any chance list the other books? Just finished reading The Innovator's Dilemma. Phenomenal read.
    - gumby 3y ago
      Two other important ones for entrepreneurs: - “Crossing the Chasm” in the end this book is really just a single drawing, but the text explains the problem: why early traction not only doesn’t imply future growth, but if misunderstood, can kill any future growth. Also very important for investors and people at big companies. - I really like the underrated “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation” by Utterback. It’s kind of a complement to the other two, full of amazing market hacks to get a new product established. For example, 120 years ago, electric companies would put on demo sessions for the public, so the gas companies would send people with metal bars in their sleeves to short out the electrical systems (in a cloud of sparks of course!). So Edison (IIRC) got the clever idea to run the electric wiring through the gas conduit, both “for safety” and to take the gas out of service. We often don’t understand what the true characteristics and affordances of a new technology are — and neither do the customers. That’s what this book is about.
      - snwt 3y ago
        Thank you for the recommendation. I got into a rut in terms of just doing programming and reading technical content about a year ago. So, I started reading from a list of books mentioned in various HN posts. As I slowly make my way through the list, I feel both like an idiot for not having read these books earlier, and at the same time thoroughly happy that there are such beautiful concepts out there to learn that's not just programming or systems design. Hadn't heard about the Utterback one! Seems like it would be right up my alley.
macintux 3y ago
People have often indicated we would have consolidated on iPhone-like devices in Apple’s absence, but I’m not convinced. Apple was unique: they were willing to bet the company on a single form factor, they had a small but loyal and vocal fan base, and they had their own retail stores to give people the opportunity to experience the phone. Anyone else would have made it just one of a half dozen phones and it would have languished in a dusty corner of one of the crappy operator stores where no one knew how to use it or had any reason to push it.
- jakobson14 3y ago
  Read up on handspring. Their phone was the full modern smartphone years before the iphone. They're the ones who met with Larry Page and got him to make a mobile version of Google.com. Jobs met with handspring back when apple was focused on the mac PC. Jobs stood up at the whiteboard and drew a mac with all the aspects of a person's life around it. Handspring's CEO or CTO stood up and drew a handspring phone and all the same photos, music, www, etc around it. "Except you'll carry this with you everywhere you go." It was at that moment jobs realized he needed to build a phone and what it needed to look like. Thing is, while handspring got there ~5 years before jobs did, they didn't have anything to leverage. They were a small startup and completely at the mercy of the telco carriers with their existing cellular subscribers, who then proceeded to force changes to the interface and apps. Handspring actually had to risk it all on their vision of what a phone should be. Jobs had a healthy apple with a healthy mac computer lineup and billions in the bank. When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way. Handed the concept and executed with essentially zero risk.
  - jolux 3y ago
    > When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way That's actually not true, all of the telcos rejected the pitch except AT&T. There was considerable risk in it from their perspective, because Apple wanted total control over the user experience: no carrier logos on the handset, no carrier logos in the operating system, no preinstalled carrier software.
smugma 3y ago
I have a cousin who still fondly talks about how great Nokia was in its heyday. Great engineers, leading edge hardware and innovation, leading supply chain, etc. It’s always weird to hear. He blamed Nokia’s inability to come up with a decent mobile OS and get behind it. Horace Dediu has written a lot about both Apple and Nokia. I recall him saying Nokia did some things really well. I think they were caught totally flat footed, and the Symbian debacle did them in
bandergirl 3y ago
Nokia had vision and creativity, don’t forget the N-Gage, the first phone/smartphone/console hybrid. I think it just lacked in software investment. Nobody thought it was necessary or even possible to deliver that kind of experience on phones. The iPhone came out when Windows XP was the default PC experience for most of the world, why would anyone need anything like iPhoneOS on a damn phone? Talk about overkill.
foobarian 3y ago
There was some fancy 6 inch or so Nokia PDA from around that time that was supposed to be amazing. It had all the good hacker features - it ran Linux, it had driver support, you could ssh from it, etc. I remember turning it on and seeing kernel printk logs scrolling, followed by the plain X cross-thatch, and then some home grown window manager where you had to use a stylus to move the mouse cursor to click on stuff. That kinda summed up Nokia for me, developing 80s tech in the 2000s.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  Their S60 phones were based on Symbian and had a web browser based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore at the end of 2005. By all accounts they were good, hackable, general-purpose mobile devices. Then Steven Elop left Microsoft to become Nokia CEO; decided to move everything to Windows Phone; publicly pointed out everything was on fire; crashed the stock price by 85%; sold Nokia to Microsoft at a massive discount; and then finally rejoined Microsoft. If it wasn’t an act of corporate sabotage designed to obtain Microsoft an established phone vendor subsidiary at a fraction of its cost, then it’s hard to see how he could have done a better job on purpose.
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    Well, Nokia also got a good chunk of cash for the phones division, and it didn't exactly turn into a cash cow for MS. So, maybe Nokia got the better end of that stick in the end.

macintux 3y ago

I don’t recall the precise details, but one of the key Android people was watching the keynote and had that immediate realization: their prototypes had just been obsoleted.

haunter 3y ago
This was the original Android demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg
- macintux 3y ago
  That was a year later IIRC.
bonestamp2 3y ago
Yep, their prototype was more like a BlackBerry than an iPhone and they immediately had to switch gears and make one like the iPhone instead: https://www.androidpolice.com/first-android-prototype-google-sooner-phone-hands-on/ https://www.androidpolice.com/first-android-prototype-google...

ajross 3y ago

It was a lot less of a paradigm shift at the time than it seems like in hindsight, actually. In fact there were competing phones with Windows Mobile or Symbian that did have similar hardware specs. (Really if you have to pick the single defining hardware innovation of the iPhone, it was the full slate capacitative touchscreen.) And in some areas the iPhone was clearly behind, shipping with a EDGE-only radio at a time where other networks were rapidly deploying 3G hardware. But the big missing bit was the app store, which didn't exist yet. When the iPhone shipped, it was a very expensive phone with a web browser, and nothing else. Jobs was going on stage saying that web apps were all anyone needed, and people were laughing at him. When the app store was finally released it only barely beat Android to market. It wasn't really until the 3G/3GS generation that the product really hit its stride, and a few more revs after that before it became the sine qua non accessory for the tech set. In hindsight, yeah, that was a huge inflection point. But at the time there were a lot of reasons to prefer other devices.

wrs 3y ago
The iPhone was a software innovation that was years ahead of the industry at the time, enabled by that one hardware innovation that you’re sounding rather dismissive of.
- ajross 3y ago
  I don't think I'm "dismissing" anything. I replied to a comment that made what I think is an incorrect point about how the product was received at release. It's too easy to take a successful product and mythologize its origins, when in fact history was complicated and in a lot of ways the early iPhone kinda sucked. Again, there were existing app ecosystems on Symbian/Nokia and Windows, and none of that stuff, or anything like it, ran on an iPhone. You couldn't even get your email on the device outside of a handful of open source web clients (its inability to run the gmail client was a big hole, heavily reported at the time).
  - wrs 3y ago
    The early iPhone sucked in ways similar to how the early iPod sucked, and was received with similar reactions. In both cases, the folks who predicted failure focused too much on the technical deficiencies of the V1 product and not enough on the game-changing difference in approach. In the iPhone’s case that meant betting fully on a multitouch screen with a rich, smoothly animated GUI, and wresting software control away from the carriers. I think the latter in particular was not sufficiently appreciated.

Seanambers 3y ago

It's hard to overstate just how big of a leap the iPhone was. Critics only focused on the shortcomings but neglected to see what it really was. Steve Jobs Introducing at Macworld in 2007 is a classic for the ages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg

ayewo 3y ago
I remember a lot of tech reporters were quick to mock the iPhone for not supporting a feature they all took for granted: copy and paste.
- goodlinks 3y ago
  3g and wifi hotspot were another two big ones (edit: that made me stick with the somewhat ridiculous htc/windows i was using) iirc *edit: i say ridiculous as the iphone still made it look totally crap
  - jochem9 3y ago
    3g came in the second gen iPhone (called iPhone 3G; afaik there has never been an iPhone 2). Only edge when outside wifi range was actually a huge downside of the first gen. It was sub par to the phone I had back then (Nokia N95). I only adopted the iPhone when it got 3g.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  These types of "tech reporters" are appropriately and brilliantly mocked in SNL's "iPhone workers" skit: https://youtu.be/AJJ353epH3o https://youtu.be/AJJ353epH3o. Point being, it's fine to say "sure, it's missing cut-and-paste, but not hard to see how that's a really insignificant nit for most people that will easily be addressed in a subsequent software update," but all too often I see tech reporters latch on to some relatively small detail that they try to make a huge brouhaha over because they have nothing better to say.
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  Copy and paste was the reason I remember being bandied around inside MS at the time. I made the point that I was sure they could figure out cut and paste before we could figure out everything else. Other phones like O2 had capacitive touch but you couldn’t design a whole interface around it as it was very expensive and hardly anyone had it. Apple went in big and got it to price point people could afford. It saw it as clearly game changing, but being young and nieve I overestimated the ability for other companies to effectively compete even when they could see a model of what works.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I remember 2 audience reactions really, really clearly from the original iPhone launch: 1. the reactions to "flick to scroll". 2. reaction to pinch-to-zoom. In both cases the audience was just gobsmacked: oohs, ahs and cheers all around. For people saying there were other devices out there at the time with similar or better hardware specs, or even comparable feature sets, I think you are totally missing the point. That kind of comparison is making the same mistake as the infamous "Less space than a Nomad. Lame" Slashdot comment re the iPod. I remember trying out the original iPhone the second day it was on sale, and just being blown away - and I worked in the mobile industry at the time and was well aware of the features of other phones. The overall experience of the iPhone was just legions ahead of anything else that existed at that time.

indigoabstract 3y ago
Yes, there were already phones with touchscreens before the iPhone, but they were all using a stylus, which seemed a better choice than a finger at the time, since they were more precise. But after the iPhone came out, it quickly became obvious how much better it was to use a screen with a finger with multi-touch than with a stylus. Steve or whoever made the decisions about the iPhone obviously knew very well what they were going for and 100% deserve the success.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Those stylus touchscreen phones had a 640x480 or an 800x600 resolution and a full web browser. They could use basically any web site on the internet. The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version. I figured that access to the entire web was a killer feature that would let the clunkier stylus phones compete successfully with an iPhone. Not a prediction that aged well.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    > The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version. That's just totally wrong. In fact, IIRC the original iPhone announcement showed a visit to the NY Times website to show how you could scroll around and zoom "full screen" websites. If anything, the ability to navigate "desktop" sites on the iPhone was much better than other phones because those other versions of "full web browser" were clunky incarnations that made it difficult to zoom in and scroll around. It was pinch and double tap to zoom, and finger-on-screen to scroll that made browsing sites on the "normal" web much better than anything else at the time.