8 ms·

Before Apple introduced the iPhone

113 points by unalone 17y ago

c00p3r 17y ago
For me, when someone point me an iPhone the first association that comes to mind is a brilliantly implemented concept of a deck of cards. This is an essence of iPhone - not only touch-based interface, but this touch technology along with carefully designed properly sized, cached content with fast possible switching between "cards". The concept of card tricks. That sells. There are the second part - implementation - OSX based kernel, llvm-gcc, webkit-based browser, but all these techniques are ordinary. And of course, they have their sales and marketing. Together that won. btw, N900 is an very interesting move. It could be positioned as a "standard mobile computer" or "just a hardware". In that case community will write everything, like it was in the story of Linux.
Zak 17y ago
There were no manufacturer owned and operated on-the-phone application stores as the sole source A sole source for applications on a given platform is a Bad Thing. I say this as a supporter of the principle of app stores. It's better for the consumer on most any computing platform to have a single default system for software purchase, download, installation and updates. I find the centralized package management on most Linux distributions to be one of their biggest advantages over other platforms. It's the single part that's a problem; it means that the market does not have the final say on what will become popular on the platform.
asnyder 17y ago
Many of these points are not correct. I had an excellent Siemens SX66 (HTC BlueAngel) years before the iPhone was introduced. The screen was a nice 3.5" touchscreen, had excellent wifi and unlimited internet (at about $10 less than it is now, with no 5gb cap), and allowed me to install thousands of third party applications. Not to mention that Microsoft had a pretty decent .NET PocketPc framework that made writing apps a breeze. While it's true that the iPhone did introduce some nifty features and concepts that changed the smartphone landscape, this list is overblown and incorrect.
- asnyder 17y ago
  Wow, all of my posts now being downmodded excessively. Hacker News is suppose to be one of the few places left for unbias and rational discussion. I guess that's not the case anymore, especially when it comes to apple products.
  - unalone 17y ago
    You've been upvoted everywhere. Hacker News has some assholes who like downvoting, but there's more of us than there are of them. We do like downvoting people who complain about downvotes, so I hope you don't mind my bumping you down here.
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    Complaining about voting reliably earns a downvote from me. Such comments add nothing to the discussion. Additionally, snarky jabs at the rest of the HN userbase for not providing unbiased and rational discussion are not a good way of getting unbiased and rational replies. It is more likely to perpetuate fanboy/hater bickering, which we can all at least try to keep to a minimum.
  - shimi 17y ago
    Get use to it, I know I did :-)
- rimantas 17y ago
  Care to elaborate, which of the points are incorrect? How was using multitouch on that nice screen (half the resoliution of the iPhone and 35k colors only)? Was the WiFi integration seamless? How was browsing experience with mobile IE? Installing all those apps was an one click deal, right? Was distributing them a breeze too?
  - mquander 17y ago
    Distributing a Windows Mobile application involves putting your CAB file on a webpage somewhere, as opposed to paying for a development license and submitting your software to Apple hoping to be eventually approved for inclusion in the App Store (if you want to be available to the non-jailbroken majority of users.) I don't think that particular comparison is very flattering to Apple.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
He goes a bit fanboy, and it's perhaps a tad US-centric, but the basic gist is correct. Some of the points seem a bit of a stretch, but only because they're obvious once you realise you're selling a tiny, internet-connected computer (which can also make phone calls). One big thing that Apple made easy that he misses is the ability to upgrade your phone software through iTunes just by plugging it in to your computer. I did it a couple of times with Sony Ericcsons and the process was positively baroque. One relevant failure to note, Apple tried to sell the first iPhone at the market rate. US carriers obviously didn't like that and now we are back to subsidies that are opaque and confusing to consumers, just the way they like it. (Note the exact same happened with iTunes and the Music Industry. Everyone else caved to them and progress stagnated till Apple shook everything up. Couple of years later, once the immediate threat of everything being DRM encrusted WMA has faded from people's minds, and Apple becomes the evil empire.)
- rythie 17y ago
  What I don't understand is why you need to plug it in to upgrade, I'd rather I could just update over the air like apps from app store do. My Nokia N96 is capable of this in principle (though it never works because my network doesn't approve the updates).
  - nixy 17y ago
    An iPhone update is ~350 Mb or so, which might not be suitable 1) to download over air or 2) store on the device while still running the older software version (350 Mb is a lot of space).
    - windsurfer 17y ago
      An interesting note: The Apple ][ OS was 411 KB.
      - alain94040 17y ago
        I don't think so, considering the machine had 48 KB (or 64 KB on the IIe).
zedwill 17y ago
The article mentions Apple as it had made the iphone and the app store out of thin air. It mentions nokia, motorola and the other manufacturers as being unable to create such a innovative product like the iphone. It is not true. It is a pity Palm shooted itself after successful devices like Palm Pilot or Tungsten. Palm could have made the iphone. It had extensive experience in touch screen devices. It had previous endeavors in phone-pda hybrids like the Treo. Palm could have made the jump, if only they haven't split in palm one and palm source and keep the good work on. And the same story happens with Amazon Kindle and similar devices. I have been reading ebooks in Palm (thanks to plucker, great open source reader) for ages before ebook readers even existed.
- joezydeco 17y ago
  I take a slight objection to the statement that Android wasn't there until the iPhone came along. The project was underway long before Google picked them up in 2005, and development on this idea of an open-source phone OS was going on without knowing what Apple was doing. And sure, iPhone is a more robust platform, but there were inklings of a 'free-the-phone-from-the-carrier' movement without Apple's involvement. There were also smaller mobile linux projects underway like Qtopia and Maemo.
- rimantas 17y ago
  It mentions nokia, motorola and the other manufacturers as being unable to create such a innovative product like the iphone. It is not true. So they did make one? If they did not, how is that not true?
  - zedwill 17y ago
    Obviously they din't, if so we would be talking of the pPhone now.
  - stse 17y ago
    Because the smartphone market is a small part of the global market. The iphone is also one of the most expensive phones around. In a few years when the market gets more mature we will see a lot more competition from the "other manufacturers". Most of which also provides telecommunication systems.
cosmo7 17y ago
Article is predicated on the idea that evil and innovation are mutually exclusive. I think it's more true that evil and innovation are pretty tightly coupled.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Innovation is one of the disguises evil uses in its larval form. Let's see what Apple does with its market dominance.
- roc 17y ago
  I don't think evil is related to size or innovation; it's just selective reporting. E.g. People only care about whether a company is evil if it creates products and services they want to use, or whether the company is so massive that it can't be avoided. Small companies can't, and companies with crappy products don't, inflict their evil upon you -- so no-one notes whether they're evil or not, skewing results. It could well be (and I believe it to be the case) that every company is essentially 'evil', but that tendency can only be exposed when they attain the requisite leverage to push what they want, as a priority, onto the market.
  - unalone 17y ago
    Perhaps it's not evil so much as it is difficulty in making decisions? Everybody has good intentions, and most people fuck them up at some point or other. The difference is that when large companies fuck up, it hurts more than when individuals do, and it's more noticeable.
dejb 17y ago
1-8 these apply to the US only. 9. Mobile devices were phones first and last, not usable handheld computers Pocketpc and Palm phones were fully fledged handheld computers for years before. If you don't believe me check the list of apps at http://www.smartphonemag.com/awards/winners_ppc_2005.html http://www.smartphonemag.com/awards/winners_ppc_2005.html 10. Even the smartest phones didn’t have seamless WiFi integration Maybe not seemless but functional. A search for 'wifi switching iphone' shows everything isn't perfect yet. 11. Without Visual Voice Mail, messages couldn’t be managed non-linearly Don't know. Not really my thing. 12. There were no manufacturer owned and operated on-the-phone application stores as the sole source True the app store is an innovation. It's a great idea apart from the compulsory part. 13. An on-the-phone store having 65,000 apps downloaded nearly 2 billion times was not on anyone’s radar screen This is a repeat of 12. However it should be noted that there would have been 1000s of pocket pc apps available in 2006. 14-16 These are all basically about the app store. Pretty much repeating 12 and 13. 17. Buttons, keys, joysticks, sliders…anything but the screen was the focus of phones There where popular touch screen which had only a few buttons. My recently retired HTC Magician (not Magic) was one of these. 18. Phones didn’t come with huge 3.5″ touch screens Many Did. Some had bigger screens. 19. Pervasive multitouch, gesture-based UI was science fiction Apple did bring many of these to market for the first time. I'm not sure if anyone had developed a phone intended to be used by hand as opposed to stylus. that said the stylus is pretty powerful in it's own right. 20. Actually usable, multi-language, multitouch virtual keyboards on phones didn’t exist Deliberate repeat of multitouch. Apart from that many virtual keyboard existed 21. Integrated sensors like accelerometers and proximity detectors had no place in phones 'The first phone from the company to feature an accelerometer was the Sony Ericsson W910 and the Sony Ericsson K850.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerometer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerometer 22. Phones could never compete in 3D/gaming with dedicated portable consoles I had quake running on my HTC Magicician in 2006. There seemed to be a lot of other games available. 23. iPod-class audio/video players on mobiles didn’t exist Many phones had popular music players. 24. No phone had ever offered a desktop-like web browser experience Opera 25. Sophisticated SDKs and phones were strangers to each other No. Wrong. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ so what are we left with 1. helped in the process of freeing US users from bad carrier slavery 2. The app store 3. A user interface designed to be used with fingers including multitouch and swipe. Good achievements but they didn't 'invent' the genre. If you take away 1. You are left with an evolutionary not revolutionary contribution.
wallflower 17y ago
Before Apple introduced the iPhone, some software manufacturers thought it was OK to wipe out everything on your mobile device when upgrading the OS. "NOTE: Before proceeding please ensure that all data on your Wing is backed up, and the e-mail settings for each of your e-mail accounts are known or are written down. Installing the new software will erase all the data on the device. NOTE: All third party applications and data that remain on the device prior to downloading the new software will be deleted and un-retrievable. Third party applications will need to be re-downloaded after the new software has been installed." https://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm52082.xml https://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm52082.xml
- andreyf 17y ago
  An interesting note: after I lost my iPhone, restoring the replacement from the backup I didn't realize iTunes had been making reset not just the e-mail settings and contacts, but the ring tone settings, wireless network passwords, etc. As much as I try to stay away from being a fanboy, I was very pleased with the UX.

113 points by unalone 17y ago

For me, when someone point me an iPhone the first association that comes to mind is a brilliantly implemented concept of a deck of cards. This is an essence of iPhone - not only touch-based interface, but this touch technology along with carefully designed properly sized, cached content with fast possible switching between "cards". The concept of card tricks. That sells. There are the second part - implementation - OSX based kernel, llvm-gcc, webkit-based browser, but all these techniques are ordinary. And of course, they have their sales and marketing. Together that won. btw, N900 is an very interesting move. It could be positioned as a "standard mobile computer" or "just a hardware". In that case community will write everything, like it was in the story of Linux.

Zak 17y ago

There were no manufacturer owned and operated on-the-phone application stores as the sole source A sole source for applications on a given platform is a Bad Thing. I say this as a supporter of the principle of app stores. It's better for the consumer on most any computing platform to have a single default system for software purchase, download, installation and updates. I find the centralized package management on most Linux distributions to be one of their biggest advantages over other platforms. It's the single part that's a problem; it means that the market does not have the final say on what will become popular on the platform.

asnyder 17y ago

Many of these points are not correct. I had an excellent Siemens SX66 (HTC BlueAngel) years before the iPhone was introduced. The screen was a nice 3.5" touchscreen, had excellent wifi and unlimited internet (at about $10 less than it is now, with no 5gb cap), and allowed me to install thousands of third party applications. Not to mention that Microsoft had a pretty decent .NET PocketPc framework that made writing apps a breeze. While it's true that the iPhone did introduce some nifty features and concepts that changed the smartphone landscape, this list is overblown and incorrect.

asnyder 17y ago
Wow, all of my posts now being downmodded excessively. Hacker News is suppose to be one of the few places left for unbias and rational discussion. I guess that's not the case anymore, especially when it comes to apple products.
- unalone 17y ago
  You've been upvoted everywhere. Hacker News has some assholes who like downvoting, but there's more of us than there are of them. We do like downvoting people who complain about downvotes, so I hope you don't mind my bumping you down here.
- GHFigs 17y ago
  Complaining about voting reliably earns a downvote from me. Such comments add nothing to the discussion. Additionally, snarky jabs at the rest of the HN userbase for not providing unbiased and rational discussion are not a good way of getting unbiased and rational replies. It is more likely to perpetuate fanboy/hater bickering, which we can all at least try to keep to a minimum.
- shimi 17y ago
  Get use to it, I know I did :-)
rimantas 17y ago
Care to elaborate, which of the points are incorrect? How was using multitouch on that nice screen (half the resoliution of the iPhone and 35k colors only)? Was the WiFi integration seamless? How was browsing experience with mobile IE? Installing all those apps was an one click deal, right? Was distributing them a breeze too?
- mquander 17y ago
  Distributing a Windows Mobile application involves putting your CAB file on a webpage somewhere, as opposed to paying for a development license and submitting your software to Apple hoping to be eventually approved for inclusion in the App Store (if you want to be available to the non-jailbroken majority of users.) I don't think that particular comparison is very flattering to Apple.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

He goes a bit fanboy, and it's perhaps a tad US-centric, but the basic gist is correct. Some of the points seem a bit of a stretch, but only because they're obvious once you realise you're selling a tiny, internet-connected computer (which can also make phone calls). One big thing that Apple made easy that he misses is the ability to upgrade your phone software through iTunes just by plugging it in to your computer. I did it a couple of times with Sony Ericcsons and the process was positively baroque. One relevant failure to note, Apple tried to sell the first iPhone at the market rate. US carriers obviously didn't like that and now we are back to subsidies that are opaque and confusing to consumers, just the way they like it. (Note the exact same happened with iTunes and the Music Industry. Everyone else caved to them and progress stagnated till Apple shook everything up. Couple of years later, once the immediate threat of everything being DRM encrusted WMA has faded from people's minds, and Apple becomes the evil empire.)

rythie 17y ago
What I don't understand is why you need to plug it in to upgrade, I'd rather I could just update over the air like apps from app store do. My Nokia N96 is capable of this in principle (though it never works because my network doesn't approve the updates).
- nixy 17y ago
  An iPhone update is ~350 Mb or so, which might not be suitable 1) to download over air or 2) store on the device while still running the older software version (350 Mb is a lot of space).
  - windsurfer 17y ago
    An interesting note: The Apple ][ OS was 411 KB.
    - alain94040 17y ago
      I don't think so, considering the machine had 48 KB (or 64 KB on the IIe).

zedwill 17y ago

The article mentions Apple as it had made the iphone and the app store out of thin air. It mentions nokia, motorola and the other manufacturers as being unable to create such a innovative product like the iphone. It is not true. It is a pity Palm shooted itself after successful devices like Palm Pilot or Tungsten. Palm could have made the iphone. It had extensive experience in touch screen devices. It had previous endeavors in phone-pda hybrids like the Treo. Palm could have made the jump, if only they haven't split in palm one and palm source and keep the good work on. And the same story happens with Amazon Kindle and similar devices. I have been reading ebooks in Palm (thanks to plucker, great open source reader) for ages before ebook readers even existed.

joezydeco 17y ago
I take a slight objection to the statement that Android wasn't there until the iPhone came along. The project was underway long before Google picked them up in 2005, and development on this idea of an open-source phone OS was going on without knowing what Apple was doing. And sure, iPhone is a more robust platform, but there were inklings of a 'free-the-phone-from-the-carrier' movement without Apple's involvement. There were also smaller mobile linux projects underway like Qtopia and Maemo.
rimantas 17y ago
It mentions nokia, motorola and the other manufacturers as being unable to create such a innovative product like the iphone. It is not true. So they did make one? If they did not, how is that not true?
- zedwill 17y ago
  Obviously they din't, if so we would be talking of the pPhone now.
- stse 17y ago
  Because the smartphone market is a small part of the global market. The iphone is also one of the most expensive phones around. In a few years when the market gets more mature we will see a lot more competition from the "other manufacturers". Most of which also provides telecommunication systems.

cosmo7 17y ago

Article is predicated on the idea that evil and innovation are mutually exclusive. I think it's more true that evil and innovation are pretty tightly coupled.

rbanffy 17y ago
Innovation is one of the disguises evil uses in its larval form. Let's see what Apple does with its market dominance.
roc 17y ago
I don't think evil is related to size or innovation; it's just selective reporting. E.g. People only care about whether a company is evil if it creates products and services they want to use, or whether the company is so massive that it can't be avoided. Small companies can't, and companies with crappy products don't, inflict their evil upon you -- so no-one notes whether they're evil or not, skewing results. It could well be (and I believe it to be the case) that every company is essentially 'evil', but that tendency can only be exposed when they attain the requisite leverage to push what they want, as a priority, onto the market.
- unalone 17y ago
  Perhaps it's not evil so much as it is difficulty in making decisions? Everybody has good intentions, and most people fuck them up at some point or other. The difference is that when large companies fuck up, it hurts more than when individuals do, and it's more noticeable.

dejb 17y ago

1-8 these apply to the US only. 9. Mobile devices were phones first and last, not usable handheld computers Pocketpc and Palm phones were fully fledged handheld computers for years before. If you don't believe me check the list of apps at http://www.smartphonemag.com/awards/winners_ppc_2005.html http://www.smartphonemag.com/awards/winners_ppc_2005.html 10. Even the smartest phones didn’t have seamless WiFi integration Maybe not seemless but functional. A search for 'wifi switching iphone' shows everything isn't perfect yet. 11. Without Visual Voice Mail, messages couldn’t be managed non-linearly Don't know. Not really my thing. 12. There were no manufacturer owned and operated on-the-phone application stores as the sole source True the app store is an innovation. It's a great idea apart from the compulsory part. 13. An on-the-phone store having 65,000 apps downloaded nearly 2 billion times was not on anyone’s radar screen This is a repeat of 12. However it should be noted that there would have been 1000s of pocket pc apps available in 2006. 14-16 These are all basically about the app store. Pretty much repeating 12 and 13. 17. Buttons, keys, joysticks, sliders…anything but the screen was the focus of phones There where popular touch screen which had only a few buttons. My recently retired HTC Magician (not Magic) was one of these. 18. Phones didn’t come with huge 3.5″ touch screens Many Did. Some had bigger screens. 19. Pervasive multitouch, gesture-based UI was science fiction Apple did bring many of these to market for the first time. I'm not sure if anyone had developed a phone intended to be used by hand as opposed to stylus. that said the stylus is pretty powerful in it's own right. 20. Actually usable, multi-language, multitouch virtual keyboards on phones didn’t exist Deliberate repeat of multitouch. Apart from that many virtual keyboard existed 21. Integrated sensors like accelerometers and proximity detectors had no place in phones 'The first phone from the company to feature an accelerometer was the Sony Ericsson W910 and the Sony Ericsson K850.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerometer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerometer 22. Phones could never compete in 3D/gaming with dedicated portable consoles I had quake running on my HTC Magicician in 2006. There seemed to be a lot of other games available. 23. iPod-class audio/video players on mobiles didn’t exist Many phones had popular music players. 24. No phone had ever offered a desktop-like web browser experience Opera 25. Sophisticated SDKs and phones were strangers to each other No. Wrong. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ so what are we left with 1. helped in the process of freeing US users from bad carrier slavery 2. The app store 3. A user interface designed to be used with fingers including multitouch and swipe. Good achievements but they didn't 'invent' the genre. If you take away 1. You are left with an evolutionary not revolutionary contribution.

wallflower 17y ago

Before Apple introduced the iPhone, some software manufacturers thought it was OK to wipe out everything on your mobile device when upgrading the OS. "NOTE: Before proceeding please ensure that all data on your Wing is backed up, and the e-mail settings for each of your e-mail accounts are known or are written down. Installing the new software will erase all the data on the device. NOTE: All third party applications and data that remain on the device prior to downloading the new software will be deleted and un-retrievable. Third party applications will need to be re-downloaded after the new software has been installed." https://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm52082.xml https://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm52082.xml

andreyf 17y ago
An interesting note: after I lost my iPhone, restoring the replacement from the backup I didn't realize iTunes had been making reset not just the e-mail settings and contacts, but the ring tone settings, wireless network passwords, etc. As much as I try to stay away from being a fanboy, I was very pleased with the UX.