Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

Visual voicemail