3 ms·
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 mobil
by 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.
- goalieca 3y agoRemoving carriers from the phone turned out to be one of the biggest innovations alongside having a real web browser. Edit: for context, carriers wanted control of revenue and obviously fought against net neutrality. At the time, they made big money with SMS and other services.
- jakobson14 3y agoTotal control like that wouldn't have been possible with any telcos without several million existing customers to back apple up.