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A connected PDA was always a thing. Palm/3Com made phones. HP/Compaq made iPaq phones. Sharp made their Zaurus. The were OEM phones you could get branded. The Q

A connected PDA was always a thing. Palm/3Com made phones. HP/Compaq made iPaq phones. Sharp made their Zaurus. The were OEM phones you could get branded. The Qt guys had their Trolltech phone. Everyone wanted to see what phone software developed by an actual computer company who knew software would look like. Everyone and their brother wanted to see what an iPod phone would look like. The Apple phone was perhaps the most anticipated device in years. What surprised people wasn't that they released one, it was that they went all in on a capacitive touch screen, which was novel tech, and that it didn't have real mobile data or native apps. There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages but people were still skeptical.

type0 3y ago
> There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages Yeah and the first iPhones were terrible if you didn't jailbreak them
- stephen_g 3y ago
  Terrible compared to what? At the time, mobile applications were universally pretty crap. Browsers were atrocious, not being able to render real CSS or anything (they’d give you a simplified broken layout). I didn’t have the first iPhones (my first was the iPhone 4) but I had a first generation iPod Touch, and Safari felt pretty magical at the time compared to anything else on the market. The capacitive screen, multitouch, being able to decently render pages - lots of stuff we totally take for granted now… The App Store became publicly available just one year after the original iPhone was released too - people seem to make out as if Apple held on for years and years but the SDK was announced less than six months after the iPhone’s release and was made available to developers a couple of months later.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    Opera Mobile would render pages with heavy CSS (for the time) pretty accurately. Even with Pocket IE, a lot of pages did render pretty decently. I was able to browse and post on phpBB boards and what not with it. The browser built-in on the various Symbian devices I owned were also pretty decent. They were built on WebKit, supported real CSS, working JavaScript support, and more. When you're talking about browsers on mobiles, are you talking just WAP browsers on dumbphones or actual smartphones?
  - golergka 3y ago
    To be fair, Symbian apps were quite okay-ish. I had Nokia 6600 and it had a lot of great games and apps. Of course, when Apple finally launched the Appstore, and apps there were able to use iPhone's touchscreen, it was over for Symbian.

type0 3y ago

> There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages Yeah and the first iPhones were terrible if you didn't jailbreak them

stephen_g 3y ago
Terrible compared to what? At the time, mobile applications were universally pretty crap. Browsers were atrocious, not being able to render real CSS or anything (they’d give you a simplified broken layout). I didn’t have the first iPhones (my first was the iPhone 4) but I had a first generation iPod Touch, and Safari felt pretty magical at the time compared to anything else on the market. The capacitive screen, multitouch, being able to decently render pages - lots of stuff we totally take for granted now… The App Store became publicly available just one year after the original iPhone was released too - people seem to make out as if Apple held on for years and years but the SDK was announced less than six months after the iPhone’s release and was made available to developers a couple of months later.
- vel0city 3y ago
  Opera Mobile would render pages with heavy CSS (for the time) pretty accurately. Even with Pocket IE, a lot of pages did render pretty decently. I was able to browse and post on phpBB boards and what not with it. The browser built-in on the various Symbian devices I owned were also pretty decent. They were built on WebKit, supported real CSS, working JavaScript support, and more. When you're talking about browsers on mobiles, are you talking just WAP browsers on dumbphones or actual smartphones?
- golergka 3y ago
  To be fair, Symbian apps were quite okay-ish. I had Nokia 6600 and it had a lot of great games and apps. Of course, when Apple finally launched the Appstore, and apps there were able to use iPhone's touchscreen, it was over for Symbian.