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tragic

> Apple invented the smartphone

No they didn't.

> (and the tablet)

No they didn't.

> Facebook coined the concept of social network.

No they didn't.

In fairness, the iPad was the first tablet to matter all that much, if not the first tablet as such. But seriously now. Blackberry? Myspace? These were enormous and important businesses (BlackBerry still is). Hell, you could date social networking back to usenet if you wanted. It would be nice if people writing "mythbuster" articles did some elementary fact checking.

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> > Apple invented the smartphone (and the tablet)

> No they didn't

While you're technically correct, the iPhone was such a leap over any previous effort that it basically redefined the meaning of the word. If you showed an iPhone 1 to someone today, they'd at least recognise it as an (old) smartphone. A blackberry from the same era? I very much doubt it, and frankly I'd agree. The word now means "iphone 1 or better".

You're right about myspace though (and friendster before them)

Apple wasn't the biggest problem for the mobile phone industry though. They made an early bet on technology that wasn't mature yet and while they had some head start, partly due to aggressive business practices, other companies were catching up. If anything Apple was leading the way for more profitability. What really changed the industry was Googles price dumping of mobile operating systems.

All the other successful smartphone companies today are hardware focused, while companies with strong software departments like Nokia and RIM are struggling. Which is sad because in a couple of years hardware is going to be good enough, while we have ended up with a similar triopoly as the desktop operating systems market is suffering from.

Apples or rather jobs main contribution to the rise of the smartphones was that he convinced the providers to allow mobile data at prices that were merely very expensive instead of astronomical like before. The other innovation that accelerated the emergence of smartphones tremendously was the realization that resistive touch screens are crap and won't ever get good enough for comfortable touch control. That pretty much made better on screen keyboards possible. Also i want to point out that the 1st gen iPhone was pretty much limited in what it could do initially - Apple got completely surprised by the magnitude of interest in mobile apps and games.

The only thing Apple did for smartphones was capacitive touch for fingers, as opposed to QWERTY or stylus input. The first smartphone is arguably the 9000 Communicator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator), which was released in 1996. Even RIM (now Blackberry) only had a two-way pager back then.

Try again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Perhaps the Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry smartphones that could install and run 3rd party applications were not smartphones for the author.

Maybe they're just thinking in terms of touchscreens or something, but that's hardly what makes a phone 'smart'.

And it doesn't explain how they managed to forget myspace, friendster, friends reunited, etc, etc, etc.

It's quite remarkable how quickly these things get forgotten, even by people who (judging by the byline pics) are more than old enough to have been around at the time. These gentlemen must surely have been the target market for blackberries in the mid-oughts.

> It would be nice if people writing "mythbuster" articles did some elementary fact checking.

Yeah, I'm sure that a site ran by a former Apple exec/Be Inc. founder and one of Europe's most successful tech journalists absolutely doesn't do any fact checking.

Nerds can quibble all they want about how usenet was totally a social network and tablets were totally a thing in 1995 and smartphones were totally invented by Nokia, but the reality is that if you get out of the nerd echo chamber and ask normal people, for them tablets start with the iPad, smartphones start with the iPhone, and social networks start with Facebook.

The problem with always wanting to be "technically correct" is that it makes you miss the bigger picture.

> , but the reality is that if you get out of the nerd echo chamber and ask normal people, for them tablets start with the iPad, smartphones start with the iPhone,

And some people are convinced that the moon landing in 1969 was an hoax

Reality is that Apple didn't invented the smartphone.

If you're being very literal about the word "invented", then sure.

If instead you're using the word "invented" the way the authors are - that is, meaning making a technology enter the public consciousness and creating a mainstream industry out of it, then I stand by my original point.

> If instead you're using the word "invented" the way the authors are - that is, meaning making a technology enter the public consciousness and creating a mainstream industry out of it, then I stand by my original point.

Still wrong. iPhone didn't create a mainstream industry, inf cat, the smartphone growth pre iphone and post iphone (200-2009) was the same

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