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"Of course Apple had the market share lead with the iPhone. But the category was not "smartphone". ... The iPhone became the new state of the art for smartphone

"Of course Apple had the market share lead with the iPhone. But the category was not "smartphone". ... The iPhone became the new state of the art for smartphone." You're contradicting yourself, there. Were pre-iPhone smartphones not smartphones? Were Windows Mobile 6 phones not smartphones? Where's your line? And anyways, Gruber's not talking about your personal definition of smartphone, he's talking about the commonly accepted category of smartphones. Besides, what in Gruber's piece is factually inaccurate? You said his arguments "sound logical but are just wrong" but don't actually point out any inaccuracies.

kybernetikos 14y ago
I don't think he's contradicting himself, he's not saying that there wasn't a smartphone category before iphone, he's saying exactly that people didn't buy iphone because it was a great 'smartphone' (it had fewer features - the way people would have evaluated smartphones before iphone - on launch than smartphones that had been around for years), they bought iphone because it was a great touchscreen phone and browser experience. I think he's roughly right about that. They created a new experience and that experience became necessary to sell advanced phones. The article talks about how apple pioneered the 'more computer than phone' over the 'more phone than computer'. That's nonsense revisionist history, there were plenty of 'more computer than phones' out there years before and the iphone was significantly behind some of them in terms of computer-like behaviour. What Apple did was create a swipe friendly experience that became mandatory. What 'smartphone' meant changed dramatically, to the extent that people don't classify phones that can run apps, browse the web, play mp3s, ssh into servers, etc as smart phones these days unless they have a swipe friendly UI. To be honest though, I find the whole article pointless. I don't care about whether the media is using the wrong metric to call winners and losers in the 'smartphone' market. I'm not really interested in the media's view on this matter. I am interested in which phone is right for me, and it's not an iphone.

kybernetikos 14y ago

I don't think he's contradicting himself, he's not saying that there wasn't a smartphone category before iphone, he's saying exactly that people didn't buy iphone because it was a great 'smartphone' (it had fewer features - the way people would have evaluated smartphones before iphone - on launch than smartphones that had been around for years), they bought iphone because it was a great touchscreen phone and browser experience. I think he's roughly right about that. They created a new experience and that experience became necessary to sell advanced phones. The article talks about how apple pioneered the 'more computer than phone' over the 'more phone than computer'. That's nonsense revisionist history, there were plenty of 'more computer than phones' out there years before and the iphone was significantly behind some of them in terms of computer-like behaviour. What Apple did was create a swipe friendly experience that became mandatory. What 'smartphone' meant changed dramatically, to the extent that people don't classify phones that can run apps, browse the web, play mp3s, ssh into servers, etc as smart phones these days unless they have a swipe friendly UI. To be honest though, I find the whole article pointless. I don't care about whether the media is using the wrong metric to call winners and losers in the 'smartphone' market. I'm not really interested in the media's view on this matter. I am interested in which phone is right for me, and it's not an iphone.