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I worked at SE when the iPhone was released and that is not how I remember it. :) The mood was more like "lol, it has no buttons!", "too expensive!" and "it can

I worked at SE when the iPhone was released and that is not how I remember it. :) The mood was more like "lol, it has no buttons!", "too expensive!" and "it can't work without a stylus!" I think many seriously misjudged how "cool" Apple was back then (and consequently how much they'd be willing to spend on status symbols) and how good a snappy touch ui could be.

lysace 2y ago
Did you work with Symbian/UIQ software, feature phone software or something else? The feature phone team actually showed signs of getting the idea of no-jank and a rich UI very early.
- bjourne 2y ago
  Lund working on feature phones! My job was writing and managing test suites for verifying the J2ME implementation. It was a top secret collaboration with Motorola. They took QA work extremely seriously and bugs could delay major launches. Unfortunately for them, "rock solid J2ME" wasn't really what customers were after. :)
  - lysace 2y ago
    SE's J2ME implementation was top notch. It just worked and it was fast.
    - kalleboo 2y ago
      The fact that they did J2ME multitasking on a feature phone better than Symbian S60 did multitasking of native apps, and did it before the iPhone got any form of multitasking at all always impressed me.
      - lysace 2y ago
        Not to pile on... but let me pile on: symbian seemed eternally bureaucratic, lost in OO abstraction hell and lacked enough demo scene people who knew that a solid 60/72 fps is what mattered. People from Future Crew (Finland) and Triton (Sweden) should have been running these teams. Half ;-).
    - lysace 2y ago
      (Nokia's also worked but was slow. Everyone else's implementations tended to be both broken and slow. A particular shoutout to Samsung - they must have had 6+ separate, broken implementations.)
CamperBob2 2y ago
A lot of people made the same mistake. They didn't understand -- simply couldn't understand for some reason -- that the imperfect iPhone that was launched in 2007 was the worst one that would ever exist. You see this attitude a lot today. ("AI? LOL, it can't even count the letters in 'Strawberry.'") People have a mental block when it comes to understanding that the value of something new doesn't matter as much as its time derivative.

lysace 2y ago

Did you work with Symbian/UIQ software, feature phone software or something else? The feature phone team actually showed signs of getting the idea of no-jank and a rich UI very early.

bjourne 2y ago
Lund working on feature phones! My job was writing and managing test suites for verifying the J2ME implementation. It was a top secret collaboration with Motorola. They took QA work extremely seriously and bugs could delay major launches. Unfortunately for them, "rock solid J2ME" wasn't really what customers were after. :)
- lysace 2y ago
  SE's J2ME implementation was top notch. It just worked and it was fast.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    The fact that they did J2ME multitasking on a feature phone better than Symbian S60 did multitasking of native apps, and did it before the iPhone got any form of multitasking at all always impressed me.
    - lysace 2y ago
      Not to pile on... but let me pile on: symbian seemed eternally bureaucratic, lost in OO abstraction hell and lacked enough demo scene people who knew that a solid 60/72 fps is what mattered. People from Future Crew (Finland) and Triton (Sweden) should have been running these teams. Half ;-).
  - lysace 2y ago
    (Nokia's also worked but was slow. Everyone else's implementations tended to be both broken and slow. A particular shoutout to Samsung - they must have had 6+ separate, broken implementations.)

CamperBob2 2y ago

A lot of people made the same mistake. They didn't understand -- simply couldn't understand for some reason -- that the imperfect iPhone that was launched in 2007 was the worst one that would ever exist. You see this attitude a lot today. ("AI? LOL, it can't even count the letters in 'Strawberry.'") People have a mental block when it comes to understanding that the value of something new doesn't matter as much as its time derivative.