Before Apple introduced the iPhone

http://counternotions.com/2009/08/26/pre-iphone/

by unalone • 17 years ago

113 64 17 years ago

asnyder4• 17 years 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.

rimantas4• 17 years 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?

asnyder4• 17 years ago

I thought it was pretty clear in my first few sentences which points I was referring to.

Furthermore, your assumption about the screen and wifi is incorrect. Mobile Opera was available and was pretty decent. Yes, apps were a one click install. You get the app, either through url, or file transfer and press one button. A quick Google search would've cleared that up for you.

mquander3• 17 years 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.

rscott• 17 years ago

The point isn't that you had an exception to the rule in your pocket. The point is that these things are now, thankfully, mainstream and popular. Oh, and comparing the stylus touchscreens and the iPhone's capacitive touchscreen is kind of like saying processed bologna and ever-delicious bacon are the same because people call them both meat.

dejb8• 17 years ago

So the iPhone was so great because it was so popular? Isn't that a bit self referential?

Actually the stylus is pretty powerful. I'm considering getting one for my new Magic. Apart from being able to hand write it is quicker to type as well.

> processed bologna and ever-delicious bacon are the same because people call them both meat.

They're both just dead animals to me.

asnyder4• 17 years 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.

unalone5• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

Get use to it, I know I did :-)

ZeroGravitas• 17 years 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.)

caffeine2• 17 years ago

Honestly, you know what the difference was? Sex appeal. Pure and simple. When iPhone came out, I had the flashiest PDA available. It had WiFi and I could do phone calls over VoIP and watch movies.

But man I dropped that thing like a J2EE Enterprise Hooker when the iPhone came out. I mean it's sleek and it's gorgeous and the fracking menus have momentum! Are you kidding?! Even the texture feels good, the glass plate is smooth. If ever there was a piece of tech that could get you laid, this was it.

That's why I got an iPhone. The fact that it had all those cool technical abilities and a great free SDK is just how I rationalized it to myself later.

nailer• 17 years ago

I lost functionality when moving from a 3G Nokia N95 and a webkit browser to an iPhone with 2G only and a much less reliable webkit browser.

I was still happy - the iPhone indeed had sex appeal.

tjogin2• 17 years ago

I think I agree with what you're saying, I just have a really hard time describing hardware or software as being "sexy". I'd just say that the iPhone, unlike all of its predecessors, simply didn't suck. It was a joy to use it. Maybe we mean the same thing. Certainly, I didn't expect people to want to fuck me because I had one.

rythie• 17 years 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• 17 years 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).

zedwill2• 17 years 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.

rimantas4• 17 years 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?

zedwill2• 17 years ago

Obviously they din't, if so we would be talking of the pPhone now.

stse• 17 years 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.

joezydeco• 17 years 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.

cosmo7• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

Innovation is one of the disguises evil uses in its larval form.

Let's see what Apple does with its market dominance.

roc2• 17 years 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.

unalone5• 17 years 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.

dejb8• 17 years 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

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

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.

rimantas4• 17 years ago

You dismiss many of the point on the ground "existed, but maybe not as usable".

That's exactly why iPhone became popular: because it made many of nice features actually usable for the John S. User, not only for John Geek.

dejb8• 17 years ago

I can only count one. Can you point the others out?

Keyframe• 17 years ago

App store is also an evolutionary step (imo in a good way). Here, in Europe, most of the big carriers had (most still have) their own app stores which you could buy games and applications from with your bill or prepaid credit.

wallflower• 17 years 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

andreyf• 17 years 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.

c00p3r• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

Before Apple introduced the iPhone

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