The smartphone revolution didn't happen because we suddenly had touchscreens and processors powerful enough to have a relatively decent OS, We'd had that for ye

The smartphone revolution didn't happen because we suddenly had touchscreens and processors powerful enough to have a relatively decent OS, We'd had that for years beforehand; someone would've gotten it sooner. Not really. It is hard to imagine now, but back in 2007 the ability to pack a desktop-grade machine into the size of a chocolate bar was such an overwhelming technical leap that it literally panicked industry leaders, who didn't think it was even possible at the time [1,2]: "Mike Lazaridis was at home on his treadmill and watching television when he first saw the Apple iPhone in early 2007. There were a few things he didn't understand about the product. So, that summer, he pried one open to look inside and was shocked. It was like Apple had stuffed a Mac computer into a cellphone, he thought. To Mr. Lazaridis, (...) the iPhone was a device that broke all the rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable browser. (...) RIM by contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage. (...) If that thing catches on, we're competing with a Mac, not a Nokia, he recalled telling his staff." [1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/?page=all http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside... [2] http://www.tuaw.com/2013/12/19/when-google-engineers-first-learned-about-the-iphone-what-we-h/ http://www.tuaw.com/2013/12/19/when-google-engineers-first-l...