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Apple's iPhone Turns 10 (www.bgr.in)
An anonymous reader shares a report: "Every once in a while there is a revolutionary product that comes along, that changes everything," that's how Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone 10 years ago. To think about it, the iPhone did not have anything that anyone associated with a smartphone. On top of that, it was expensive, you could not share files over Bluetooth, it did not support 3G, it did not have an expandable storage slot and you needed iTunes for everything. But despite that, and to the horror of its rivals, everyone wanted one. Veteran journalist Steven Levy spoke with Phil Schiller, VP of Worldwide Marketing at Apple on the occasion.
you obviously don't remember the "smartphones" of the day. yes, they had those paper features but in real life it was easier not to use them. i remember when android was hyping the bluetooth or NFC file transfer. tried it with my father in law one time and discovered it was useless for anything over tiny text files.
other than apps the only useful feature the iphone was missing at release was corporate email support. a year later they licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft and with the 3GS it was the end of the blackberry
And Palm stole the idea from Apple's Newton.
The fact is that the iPhone was the first implementation that was good enough quality that the idea was compelling to lots of people. That's why it's so influential.
Firewire was much better than USB of the day. The iPod also functioned as an external hard drive. I remember installing OS X on it and booting off of it when fixing my main drive.
DVD and VHS beat LaserDiscs despite the latter's better quality.
LaserDisc did not have better image or sound quality than DVD. LD did eventually support DTS and DD but it was a pretty clever effort and it wasn't on all titles AND because LD players couldn't decode the audio, it was a secondary track that required an external decoder, a rarity at the time. DVD shipped with both bitstream and decoding support for Dolby Digital from the gate so you could hook up with 5.1 analog jacks to your existing sound system. LD did have full bitrate DTS tracks on them (whereas DVD almost always had half-rate for space issues) but doing so required sacrificing the stereo PCM track so all you got was analog stereo--if you didn't have a DTS decoder, then the sound quality was a lot worse on LD DTS titles, whereas DVD with DTS generally had a 5.1 Dolby track, with a few exceptions (Saving Private Ryan DTS edition sacrificed all the extras and the 5.1 track to get it all on disc).
As for image quality, while the first run of DVDs were a bit rough on encoding, it didn't take long for that to change. LD can resolve about 400 lines of analog video while DVD can do the full 500+ that NTSC supports. In that regard, not even close.
The real inspiration was marrying a capacitive screen large enough for fingers with a finger-centric (finger-exclusive) OS. That, and "app" pricing at $free-$5 as opposed to the traditional $15-50/app desktop pricing which was carried over to WinMo. I owned several WinMo phones before switching to a 3G(s?) simply due to the effortless touch screen.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"True, it's the only smartphone on which you can't install an application unless approved by the phone manufacturer. Nobody had that idea before."
Other phones at the time didn't let you install an application, updates, ringtones or anything unless approved by the TELCO.
So yep, opening it up to the manufacturer to sell you apps was a huge move forward. It meant strong-arming the telcos with overwhelming demand else they wouldn't carry Apple's new little product.