Nah, maybe for US citzens.
We were already using Symbian, Psion and PocketPC based phones.
The first phone with hardware support for OpenGL ES was the Nokia N95 released in September 2006, one year before iPhone, with Asphalt as their show game.
We were already using Symbian, Psion and PocketPC based phones.
The first phone with hardware support for OpenGL ES was the Nokia N95 released in September 2006, one year before iPhone, with Asphalt as their show game.
I think what he meant by "Apple created THE smartphone" is that Apple created the first mass-market smartphone which was desired by regular consumers (rather than niche buyers).
US was the only market where Nokia had troubles selling their Symbian/J2ME phones for example.
Should I start digging market shares figures of feature phones before iPhone came to be?
They really haven't.
> Should I start digging market shares figures of feature phones before iPhone came to be?
At this juncture, yes.
https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/64-million-smart-phones-shi...
Incredible how iOS fanbase tries to rewrite history.
TL;DR: Look at how Nokia's revenue collaspsed post September 2007. Look at how Android and Nokia's decision to go all in on Windows Mobile accelerated it. Then tell me that the iOS fanbase is trying to rewrite history...
N95 was just one example of the millions of Symbian, J2ME and PocketPC/WindowsCE smartphones being shipped before iOS became reality.
Nokia's revenue only collapsed due to the way Elop drove the company to the ground as means to get the bonus on his contract. As the Finn press later discovered.
Nonsense.
> N95 was just one example of the millions of Symbian, J2ME and PocketPC/WindowsCE smartphones being shipped before iOS became reality.
And none of them are around now. More to the point, all but a handful could be considered 'smart'. We could debate what smart is, but ultimately it's moot. Pre 2007, 'smart' devices were by and large business oriented, post September 2007, they started to become the norm; first with iOS, closely followed by Android. These facts are incontrovertible.
The point you are trying to make is utterly wrong. The original assertion was that Apple 'invented' the smartphone is equally wrong. However, Apple did play a significant role in defining what a smartphone is, Nokia and Symbian not so much. The proof? Where are they now?
> Nokia's revenue only collapsed due to the way Elop drove the company to the ground as means to get the bonus on his contract. As the Finn press later discovered.
Elop merely dealt the final blow. Nokia's sales declined post 2008 when they peaked with a global share of ~40%. Elop Joined late 2010...
Apparently everyone on Europe was a business person when using Nokia and Sony phones, go figure.
To anyone who used this phone, smartphones were already a thing long before iPhone was introduced. Of course iPhone changed things a lot, though IMO many were for the worse (for example i really liked using the tiny joystick on my 6600 for playing games).
Starting with the basic things that everyone who invested in smartphones at the time wanted, i.e. email, going through hilariously high cost (the reason behind it known only to insiders - Apple was in full rent-seeking mode, and required a portion of your phone bill as payment for being able to use iPhone. Not joking, that's why there were special iPhone-only tarriffs), it lacked physical keyboard, copy&paste, and a bunch of other things. iPhone 2G was also slower at running iOS 1.0 "applications" than higher end Nokia symbian phones (that used the same webkit core in browser).
Symbian devices were well known, and were more commonly considered "smartphones", as "palmphones" generally only got interest from people who really needed the power (a bit of chicken&egg issue).
The first iPhone, sure, no arguments there. The whole point of the iPhone was to make smartphones more useable for non-professionals.
In 2007, the Nokia N95 cost $795 while the iPhone cost $600.
Sauce: https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/practical-gadgetry/two-wee...
The reality in 2008 is that Apple forbid selling iPhone without contract, with contract requiring special extra Apple tax (we already had "unlimited data" for years by then). So you were paying whatever the telco asked you for the phone, then paid extra to Apple as long as you used the "iPhone tariff" (and you couldn't get it otherwise other than ebay).
Since at least in Poland majority bought the phone as part of the contract, the prices were wildly different. I can't find N95, but business oriented E51 cost me under $70. Without significant impact on monthly fees on the contract. And without paying Apple tax on my phone bill.
BTW, regarding visual voicemail... Little known thing about iOS 1-2 is that the network stack was broken and it wasn't capable of redirecting to voicemail like every other phone. Required special buggy software to get any voicemail for people running iPhones, and at least at Era GSM (present day T-Mobile Poland) it took 3 months from providing iPhone on sales and any voicemail working?
In some markets, iPhones were bundled with a contract because networks had bidding wars for exclusivity.
From the PoV of someone working at the network and having the luck to talk with some pretty high up there people... the exclusivity was only for order in which networks got the phone. As in, present-day T-Mobile Poland made a bid to be the first network to have it - but it didn't have any kind of long exclusivity and was soon followed by Orange and Plus (the other two "main" networks). All networks had special iPhone "plans" and the phone wasn't available outside of them, and the only technical difference was that said plans ultimately got the very buggy Visual Voicemail server attached and probably triggered workarounds for call handling bugs.
The Apple tax on the phone bill itself, and making it unavailable outside of contract, were all on Apple. (I think for some time using one outside of approved contract even required jailbreaking, but I can't be sure).
Granted - Symbian was a thing back then, but can you buy a Symbian phone today? Consumers voted with their money, and they wanted iPhones, not Nokias.
Fast forward to 2019, Nokia is nothing more than a trademark - making generic Android phones on one hand, and cashing in on nostalgia with their feature phones on the other hand.
They created THE smartphone - the definitive item.
Apple successfully marketed a product which was tested by Nokia engineers and deemed to be inferior.
What part of 'consumers voted with their money' don't you understand?
Possibly proving that iOS (and the hardware it runs on) was what consumers wanted in the mid-2000's and onward?
https://insights.dice.com/2013/09/25/a-timely-revision-of-el...
Symbian with Qt was already on the right path to win the hearts of many developers.
iOS and Android wiped the floor with Symbian and BB in terms of ease-of-use.
"..the inscrutable difficulty of navigating menus on Nokia's Symbian phones": https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/10/how-apples-iphone...
I worked at Nokia's R&D facility in Ruoholahti briefly in 2011, so I got inducted into the inner sanctum of history regarding the phones.
Symbian was designed for very anemic hardware, there were very tight constraints it's a marvel that the thing ran on what it did. The iPhones first CPU was at least an order of magnitude (and then double it again) more powerful than what Symbian was designed on.
the iPhone, famously did not meet any of the internal tests at Nokia, no drop test, battery life tests nor usability tests for blind people passed at all.
Basically from all avenues it looked dead on arrival.
However, it was obviously _not_ dead on arrival, and so Nokia started looking at things from a "UX first" perspective, the engineering culture was still around though, so, not a major "product" team or graphics design team to be found on the floors of the R&D facility.
But they started this effort _after_ the iPhone had launched, and these projects take a long time.
That's what Maemo was. And it was later merged with Intels efforts and named MeeGo. And everyone who used that system seemed to really enjoy it.
It was, indeed, killed in its crib by Elop. Although to be truly fair, the iPhone and Android were very incumbent at that point.
Symbian was considered obsolete or deprecated internally, not for lack of very intelligent design, but because people seemed to care for things other than that Nokia had believed people cared for.
So, Nokia saw it as an inferior product?
Perhaps this is a problem in engineer-led companies - thinking that the phone with the most megapixels in its camera, or most wifi bands is the best?
Technical brilliance counts for nothing if consumers don't want the product. See also Windows Phone, Betamax, etc
Imagine if Nokia had continued investing in a linux phone, android wouldn't be what it is today.
Yes, the iPhone is the better smartphone than Symbian-based phones. But it wasn't the first, despite the market share today.
Even the camera megapixel craze was being led by nokia. You're conflating the current dominance of the iphone for the past. At the time, the best thing about it was the finger only touch screen operation. To the best of my memory, others still needed to fall back to a stylus. Finger usage was a whackamole operation with Nseries and blackerry I used then
The simple act of making a call was so much easier and efficient, even though it lacked cut and paste.
Comparing it to feature phones is really curious because they were completely different markets. I don’t think it’s very useful in describing the iPhone’s success to point out individuals features that were also available in various existing phones.
It took Android phones many many years to even approach feeling as responsive and smooth and indicative of whether input has actually registered as the original iPhone, just scrolling through stuff and navigating around the OS. Tech at the time didn't even try on that front.
Featureless yes, but it could do enough to almost right away replace my iPod, Palm, and Nokia. One device instead of three was just too good to pass up.
You couldn't copy and paste text on an iPhone.
The camera was worse than any contemporary mid range camera phone.
Copy and paste didn’t work, but it didn’t work on any phone at the time. A few attempted it (eg, win mobile, blackberry) but it really sucked.
The camera was quite good and the ability to finally save and share photos and video was revolutionary at the time. I always thought it was funny how much it sucked at the time to try to store and send photos from my BlackJack or Blackberry.
In fact, the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch (2nd Gen) did not support multi-tasking either, even with iOS4. Apple noted performance issues.
Jail broken apps had multitasking like screen sharing, WiFi hot spotting and lots of other stuff.
It’s a big deal for an OS that doesn’t have multitasking vs doesn’t allow app developers to use.
+ Linux on phone
+ True multi-tasking with live tiles.
+ Full web browser.
+ Turn by turn on device voice navigation. Cannot stress how significant this was.
+ uncluttered swipe gestures to control the apps/windows.
+ amazing build.
- non replaceable battery.
In 2011.