Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I followed PDAs pretty closely back then, and I'm unaware of any device where the OS was built around multi-touch, like the iPhone.[1] The iPhone was one of the few devices back then to render the "real web" and being able to swipe and pinch to navigate pages was a game-changer on the order of the first mouse-based UIs. It dramatically changes how much content you can easily access on a small screen (which is why even devices with styluses today have multi-touch screens to facilitate scroll/zoom). It also improves the quality of the on-screen keyboard, enabling you to ditch the physical one (or reliance on something like Graffiti).

[1] Apple didn't invent multi-touch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t35HXAjNW6s. I believe it was the first to build a mobile UI entirely around it.

View on HN

It’s easy to forget how crazy the world was before the iPhone. Let me list the ways in which Apple blew the doors off of the industry with the iPhone:

1) battery: the iPhone was basically a giant battery strapped to a logic board. No one had designed a phone like this, ever.

2) capacitive multi-touch with inertia: capacitive touch screens existed, but the software for using them was really bad (see windows mobile 5 as the leading example).

3) non-WAP browser: all phones prior to the iPhone had a wap browser. The consensus knowledge in the industry was that doing full web on mobile was still years, maybe decades away. Apple came in and rendered the full New York Times on mobile and it changed the world.

4) App Store: before Apple, carriers had an App Store that was garbage or you sideloaded software. That was it. The App Store changed the world, not technically but politically. Finally users could get good software from their phones over the air.

I could go on for days. This doesn’t even touch carrier distribution, call quality, or any part of the OS stack which was basically black magic at the time. The iPhone really changed the world.

Visual voicemail

It's worth noting re: #4 that the iPhone did not debut with an App Store. It had the pre-installed apps and that was it for the 1st year. The App Store arrived in year 2.

That's correct. Version 1 of the iPhone also didn't have MMS and was EDGE only.

While I'm not implying that the iPhone "sucked" or some other meaningless fanboyism, when it came out, I was intrigued by the things it had that my Palm and WinMobile phones didn't. Those were always missing gpu drivers (poor responsiveness) or had resistive screens (no multitouch) or some other minor annoyance.

But the list of things I'd have to give up for a first gen iPhone (not even counting the mandatory AT&T bill in the US) made it a no-go:

No copy/paste. No third party apps (I regularly used mine to stream Shoutcast stations in the car on my cheap unlimited 3G data before it became a cash cow to be milked by the carriers). No 3G radio at all actually. No GPS. No multitasking/backgrounding apps. No MMS (which was doubly important if you didn't have 3rd party IM apps).

I was in a geek dilemma. Apple fixed the UI but lacked most of what made my smartphone "smart" at the time. Likewise, all of the ones with more capabilities lacked the smooth UI and usability improvements of the iPhone.

I'm just glad that in subsequent years Apple slowly added in functionality while their competitors got the message that usability was important as well.

IMHO that is Apples secret to success. Ignore the geeks/nerds/fanboys, first try to reach the 'real' market. Then you can fix your product up for 'niche interests' later.

I'd say that "apps as first-class objects" was the real innovation. My first thought on seeing the iPhone demo was that having Phone as an app made so much sense! Every other device at the time seemed to treat apps almost like plugins running on top of a phone/productivity-centered OS. In iPhone OS, practically everything you did was neatly encapsulated by the round-rect of a friendly app on your home screen. The App Store naturally followed from this approach.

>3) non-WAP browser: all phones prior to the iPhone had a wap browser. The consensus knowledge in the industry was that doing full web on mobile was still years, maybe decades away. Apple came in and rendered the full New York Times on mobile and it changed the world.

Well, almost all. There were non-WAP browsers (Nokia, Windows phones, etc), but still crappy and limited at their html rendering.

They shifted the entire industry: https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/04/14/exclusive-android...

Android basically owes almost all of its usability to iOS. Before the iPhone was announced, Android looked like a junky Blackberry knockoff. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#/me...)

Interesting, I always thought Android was a rip-off of iOS from the start. Didn't know it existed before iOS

Hah. And here I am loving my BlackBerry KEYone - Android with a hardware keyboard.

Apple really has been setting the paradigm for smartphones for a while now.

> Apple came in and rendered the full New York Times on mobile and it changed the world

At least until websites started redirecting iPhones to their m.domain.com. There was so much initial promise for mobile devices to offer a desktop-equivalent experience that was ruined by site operators insisting on treating iPhone (and later Android) browsers as less capable.

> 3) non-WAP browser: all phones prior to the iPhone had a wap browser.

That's incorrect. Opera Mobile launched in 2000 and was a full HTML renderer. I had it on a succession of Nokia E-series smartphones in that era. Yes, you could run apps before appstores existed...

Then in 2005 Opera Mini was released which used server-side rendering for feature-phones that couldn't run Mobile.

Integrated browser on probably every Nokia phone of 2000's (ie. "Services") was perfectly capable of displaying HTML 4/XHTML, with one important caveat that it really truly demanded valid markup on input.

Internet Explorer on WinMobile was not WAP, either. It did not render anywhere as close to desktop as the iPhone did, but it at least tried.

Do you really think opera mobile was comparable to mobile safari?

Yes, I remember getjar.com but that's not comparable to the app store. Pretending they're analogous is facetious at best.

1) was because no one needed to. Old flip phones lasted several days on a single charge - mine could go two weeks if I avoided using it.

The biggest one, IMHO, was a business model shift. Apple treated the end-user (not the carrier) as their customer, and used their clout to put their boot on the carrier's neck in enforcement of this. No longer were you buying the carrier's phone offering. You were buying Apple's phone (even if from the carrier).

Because of this, Apple was able to develop products the end-user wanted to buy, rather than the products the carriers wanted to sell.

1) I'm thinking by this you mean where the battery is non-removeable and where there is no keyboard. This was definitely something new.

3) WAP ... heck that was irrelevant since phones started having color screens. Browsers in the older Blackberries and Windows Mobile phones of the time were not WAP, but pre-WebKit applications that only implemented a subset of HTML.

4) Microsoft wanted to treat phones like it treated PCs - it would collect on software licenses. Hence it didn't see the device as something it controlled beyond selling an OS license for it. This made sense before Internet was cheap and fast on mobile devices.

iPhone was definitely a start of a major new era. I think the most significant thing is that iPhone was able to more or less end up as the boss of its own platform in the manufactuer-carrier relationship. Before iPhone, the OS was seen as something that would have to be approved by the carrier and device manufacturer.

Multi-touch deserves too much credit. It was inertia. You could flick the screen to scroll. It calculated your intent, and applied a duration. That momentum made all the difference in the world. No longer are you sitting there flick flick flicking your screen.

It is worth mentioning that the iPhone had the best multitouching system in the industry for at least 3 years. I remember the android devices struggling to register gestures when more than one finger was touching the screen.

I used to argue the same - that an iPhone is not an invention - after all Nokia, Samsung and HTC had phones that are just as capable with applications as the iPhone was and some had good music applications and others had good productivity apps. Then I saw my mom - someone who has never used a computer before - learn to use a tablet. Everything was intuitive for her. TBC, that was an android but everything that makes it intuitive came from the iPhone. The whole interface introduced by iOS - touch is a major factor but not the only one - is just intuitive for a lot of people.

My five year old has been pretty proficient on her iPad for the last year or two. I never showed her how to use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com