It makes me laugh that 'insane backwards compatibility ' now adays means that 10 year old software still works.
A lot of people who have old phones have them because they can't afford anything newer. The pressure to constantly update to newer hardware is a hardship for poor people. It de facto is one of the ways they get excluded from modern life.
I am also real freaking tired of Google apps being a suite on my cheap phone that constantly updates and threatens that you may break other apps if you disable this one. It makes it very challenging to add any apps to my phone. And my wants and needs are not huge. But Google is eating a large share of the storage space and eats into my time for clearing the cache, etc, to keep the phone functional.
I agree with the Google Apps thing, though; my employer gave me a new but cheap phone with just 4GB of internal storage, and I'm always having to cleanup so I can install anything new. And an SD card barely helps, lots of stuff simply can't be moved.
I love the internet. It makes my life vastly more workable. But it makes me crazy that there is so little effort to keep the bar for entry low in terms of money and technical savvy.
Why does my cheap phone need so many apps that I don't use, that cannot be disabled and that promptly update again after I delete all the data off of them, forcing me to delete the same data repeatedly? Is this really necessary? Come on.
Thank you.
(Yes, it would have to be Windows NT to run I think)
Read Raymond Chen's fantastic blog for how much MS have worked to keep backwards compatibility going.
And then we come to backward compatibility and mainframes:
"The IBM Z family maintains full backward compatibility. In effect, current systems are the direct, lineal descendants of System/360, announced in 1964, and the System/370 from the 1970s. Many applications written for these systems can still run unmodified on the newest IBM Z system over five decades later.[3]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z
It would be interesting to see someone try to see what the oldest unmodified app they could run on a Z series was.
Only with the 3G could they start claiming it was a smartphone.
Sadly didn't stop boneheads like a NYT writer to try to relabel it as a "superphone" because smartphone was apparently by then too pedestrian for something Apple made...
The very defining feature of a smart phone are the apps, though.
EDIT: Due to downvotes, here’s Apple’s own page advertising how iOS 2 (introduced with the iPhone 3G) adds apps to the iPhone: https://web.archive.org/web/20080912112138/http://www.apple....
LG had more than a dozen phones with touch screen (resistive) at that time that had "apps" but no third party apps (except for JavaME apps).
The game changer (as the linked site from Apple states as well) was an App Store allowing direct access to third party apps. And that's what created another modern tech revolution.
No. The point of a smartphone is to expand the scope of what can reasonably be done so they it can be considered more like a computer than a dedicated device with a narrow, defined set of capabilities. Jobs was right that the quality of the iPhone's browser was sufficient to raise it to that level.
Of course having 3rd party apps raises it to another level. It would have been a death sentence if the iPhone proceeded for too long without them while competitors developed a robust app ecosystem but that was never the plan.
Back then pretty much every high end phone had that... The IPhone wasn't anything special at that time. The IPhone really took off then they allowed 3rd party apps.
http://www.nicolasnova.net/pasta-and-vinegar/2015/6/28/some-...
10 years ago? As far as cell phones go? Most definitely the "Dark Ages"... Considering we are moving into a time frame when watches are starting to have cell connectivity:
https://www.lifewire.com/smartwatches-with-cellular-connecti...
Where are we going to be 5 years from now? 10? 20? Compare the Treo and BlackBerry to the current iPhone X, Note 8, etc...
And i see screens with more colors and pixels, but other than that not much new. It is still calendars and messages that rules.
But from EDGE to LTE, from weak single core processors to 64-bit 4/6/8 core beasts, from no GPU to what would be considered desktop grade back in the day, from shitty 3gp 144p videos to hardware accelerated 4K H.264/5/VP8/9…
Yeah, people still do messages, but messages now include high quality multimedia edited on device.
Also, web surfing rules. Opera Mini on J2ME and others sucked, it was nothing like the modern mobile web.
As for editing videos or such on a mobile device, bah humbug. The interface is not there in any more than the most rudimentary way. If anything it has regressed unless one happen to have a Galaxy Note, as fingers simply do not offer the precision.
What about doing all of the above at the same time?
"I only see" is because you are limiting what you see in a way that goes against what the vast majority of people see.
That's like saying the new MacBook is no different than a 286 because you had Excel Worksheets on both.
Or saying there is no difference between a Model-T and a 2018 Honda Civic - they both use gas, have 4 wheels and a windshield.
Lots of high-end feature-phones had all these features in 2007–2008. (GPS was not common before then, but some had it earlier.)
> Facetime in realtime to anyone in the world?
Video calling was a heavily promoted feature of the first 3G phones, a long time ago.
> What about doing all of the above at the same time?
Good feature-phones had multitasking in 2006. I would often listen to music while running multiple third-party apps (!) at the same time.
Of course, these phones cost a tiny fraction of the price of the first iPhone, so hardware limitations like having only a few megabytes of RAM were a bit constraining. The functionality was basically there though.
Even comparing the original iPhone vs the current batches of iPhone - we are talking GENERATIONS of improvements. Massively better camera's, GPU, CPU, Batter, Screens - both pixel counts and size, network infrastructure, software infrastructure (MySpace vs Facebook).
Orders of magnitude improvements across ALL of those metrics.
Simply talking multi-tasking on the original Android and iPhones vs today? Comparing those vs the Palm and Blackberries they replaced?
I've lived through 20 years of Cell Phone... 10 years ago may not have been the "Dark Ages"... but it was the time immediately afterwords (Palm/BB/WinPhone were definitely the Dark Ages).
We are comparing Horses & Buggies, Model Ts and 2018 Honda Civics... the Model T was better than horses and buggies... but not that much better.
The much maligned N-Gage had a true multitasking OS with internet and apps in 2003, except Americans never got along with Nokia or Symbian OS.