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But there's one huge difference between 1999 and 2014 - mobile phones. And people, everyone, seems much more accepting of digital delivery services. Back then i

• Curmudgel 12y ago
  You should say "smart phones" instead of "mobile phones". The Nokia 3210, which came out in 1999 and was bought 160 million times, has similar dimensions (same height and smaller width) to the iPhone5, and although it is more than 2x as thick as the iPhone 5, the smallest model was still less than an 7/10 of an inch thick. I would guess that it also has better battery life than any smart phone sold today.
  • beamatronic 12y ago
    There were mobile devices in 1999-2000 such as the Palm devices that were easily capable of running a network stack, but what really changed in the last 15 years is the deployment, improvement, and adoption of wireless data services - We had to wait for the network to catch up.
  • ianstallings 12y ago
    Yes much more accurate to say smart phones came along. Back then the "mobile" experience was typically a WAP/WML service that would display text on the screen that you could navigate. I actually worked on a service back then called Strategy.com that used WML to deliver news, weather, and traffic to mobile devices. It was very limited. We thought we were awesome when we created traffic notifications using a push service that cell providers would bundle on the phone.