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Comment by kumarm | Hacker News Reader

As someone who developed for Mobile Phones pre iPhone era, I can say they are people who never worked on software for Mobile before iPhone :).

There were number of Phone that existed with several of those styles.

How many people know Verizon Had a decent app store (Apps developed with Brew) in US before iPhone? This included similar testing that you see for AppStore TODAY.

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Yea, if I remember correctly the closest to the iPhone's look was the LG Prada one year before the iPhone.

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

Used that (was a J2ME developer at the time), it was nothing like an iPhone.

But it definitely had rounded corners.

So any reasonable person should be able to conclude that Apple did not invent rounded corners?

I've probably used more brew apps than play/appStore/etc combined since. Was a wonderfully useful store with generally high quality, useful, apps that we easy to find.

I commercially developed both Windows Mobile and Palm apps.

None had exactly the same design nor look & feel as the iPhone.

Which phone are you referring to ?

I think maybe he is talking about the general IDEA, not necessarily the look and feel. You're right in asserting that there really was nothing like iPhone before iPhone, but the IDEA was there from way back with HP Jornadas and the older BREW phones. (I do concede that the UI of all of those devices was, in PRACTICE, much different than the iPhone UI. That much is undeniable when you look at old pictures of them. Back then, basically they all tried to copy MS Windows in a small screen.)

But the general idea of the UI was what set the iPhone apart. Instead of using a stylus to simulate a mouse, it used your fingers and direct manipulation of the user interface. That was a huge conceptual change.

I used my fingers on my Palm Pilot because it was more practical than dragging the stylus out. It wasn't using fingers per se that was revolutionary with the iPhone but that it packaged everything up in a package that was actually attractive to "normal people" instead of only appealing to gadget geeks and power users the way things like Palm devices did.

> I used my fingers on my Palm Pilot because it was more practical than dragging the stylus out.

Still using it in the same way as a mouse. The thing that set the iOS UI apart is direct manipulation of the UI. E.g. instead of using a scrollbar/arrows to scroll, you use your finger to move the page around. Instead of clicking a checkbox you move a slider. Instead of clicking a "zoom in" button you 'stretch' the photo out using your fingers. etc.

That might be true for some interactions, but you touched icons, buttons etc., and frankly I don't think that part would have made that much of a difference for users.

It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.

> I don't think that part would have made that much of a difference for users

I do. I think it was a revolutionary improvement. It's so much more intuitive to use, it's the one thing that makes your grandma able to use an iPad. It's hard to overstate how important this was. The fact that now you know about it, it seems obvious and not a big deal emphasises how big of an improvement it was.

> It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.

Of course not, it wasn't invented yet so they didn't know the Palm Pilot lacked this.

> Of course not, it wasn't invented yet so they didn't know the Palm Pilot lacked this.

You miss the point: Most people rejected the Palm Pilot before seeing how you interacted with it at all. The idea that how you interact with the device makes such a big difference is flawed to a large extent because these devices demonstrated quite clearly that there were other issues that stopped mass market adoption of these devices before people even bothered to figure out how you actually interacted with them.

You could look further back, all the way to 1992. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

Even Nokia had touch phones before iPhone was a thing.

https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_7710-review-31.php

I developed for Windows Mobile before and slightly after the iPhone. Windows Mobile was slightly ahead of the iPhone as an app platform until around 2009.

Can you please elaborate on what made windows mobile better for apps? Why did Microsoft not want to continue this? I think windows mobile was a complete scratch and rewrite?

My understanding for why Google wanted Android and open handset alliance is the fragmentation of mobile at that time: it took too much effort to get Google maps on all these different J2ME (I think I got the name right) devices.

I had both J2ME and Symbian versions of Google Maps running on my Symbian devices.

Anyone that tried to make an Android app run properly across Android devices, specially Samsung ones, knows that the fragmentation issues aren't gone.

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