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As long as we're offering opinions on the iPhone's killer feature, mine is that it was access to desktop web sites.

Remember WAP[1] and WML[2], the HTTP and HTML substitutes for mobile phones too anemic/limited to support the real thing? Back then, many web sites simply didn't support access from a mobile device. (It's the polar opposite of "mobile first" or "mobile only".) A few did, but many just tossed up an error page.

With the iPhone, Apple put together all the key ingredients to be able to say, if you're on the go and suddenly need to access your bank's web site to check your balance or whatever, you will be able to, even if your bank doesn't support mobile devices. The experience may not be great, but it will at least be possible.

Those key ingredients included a big screen, a fast enough processor and large enough RAM to handle pages that were somewhat bloated, a browser that supported enough (JS, etc.) to make most pages work, and special features for making the most of desktop-oriented pages by zooming in on text. To some extent, Apple brought these key ingredients together by designing it that way, but they also did it by not entering the market until powerful enough hardware was available.

The iPhone flipped mobile web access on its head. Instead of implementing whatever was convenient and punting on 50+% of the web, leaving users at the mercy of web sites to decide if mobile access was worth it to them, Apple created a device and browser that took responsibility for doing anything and everything it could to make sites work.

The web is a killer feature for the internet, and getting meaningful access to the web was a killer feature for internet-connected mobile devices. Paradoxically, it worked so well that the platform was enormously successful and it became essential to offer mobile web support.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language

Windows Mobile came with a regular browser for years before the iPhone. There was nothing crazy about first iPhone's specs either, pretty in line with the rest of the market. While it wasn't big with regular consumers, WM had a decent smartphone market share at the time (Windows Phone would never come close). Amongst executives, managers and the likes, it was absolutely dominating. When it first came out, many WM users (including Microsoft) considered the iPhone to be a joke. At best, another player in a crowded market. Sure, people liked some features. But they were considered easy-to-replicate gimmicks (and many were indeed quickly copied by enthusiasts). WM was way ahead as a platform. iOS didn't even let you install apps! Apple PCs/laptops were fairly niche at the time too. It wasn't obvious how Apple had a defensible advantage.

Quite frankly, I still tend to think it's as much about Apple knocking it out of the park with the UX (and marketing), as it is about Microsoft doing literally everything wrong in response. WM could have become what Android is today.

Nokia smartphones had http+html browsers back in 2001. I don't know how many mobile optimized sites were there, but the browser on my 9210 was pretty usable (though not everything worked, of course). I used to save full pages on my desktop and copy it on the 9210 to read while on the go. (Well, we didn't have Pocket back then, and while I definitely wanted to develop something similar, I just couldn't make myself do it in Symbian's C++ dialect.)

I disagree in that internet on the original iPhone was terrible, and everyone I knew who bought one didn't really do much browsing on it. It was the UI/UX. Being able to touch-drag was so different from the indirectness of the buttons on previous phones, or using a pen on a squishy screen (I was the nerd that was previously into Palm and Windows CE(?) devices). I remember that what my friends who had the original iPhone showed off wasn't primarily the browser, but rather the pinch-zoom feature on the photos they took, the drag-bounce effect in apps, and of course just the whole thing of having a big screen with no keyboard or somewhat gaudy keypads.

But I agree also agree with you in that my own first iPhone was the iPhone 3G, and the 3G part and later the app store became a major thing for the device, whether it was browsing the web, or using internet-centered apps (chat, sms, reddit, etc.).

Agreed. When I didn't need to boot up BREW or whatever it was called to access google at what felt like 1Bps anymore, it was a game changer. This alone was a huge improvement - I had real access to the web all of a sudden, from anywhere.

This is a great insight, I’m reading this from my iPhone now!

I think both you and Brad are right in some way.

The KILLER feature is the total time to do something that the user intends to do.

If you have a very fast OS, but bad UX then the rate-limiting step is the UX, not the OS. And the converse is also true.

Your apps UX is the language your users must learn and speak to convey their intent to software.

Having an expressive vocabulary and complex grammar is great for saying a lot quickly if they’re fluent but painfully slow for anyone who isn’t.

IMHO it was more a problem of common functions being buried 5 menus deep in a sluggish UI.

Came here to say exactly the same. I would add the capacitative touch screen as another crucial factor that made the iPhone UX so popular.

The capacitive touch and the accelerometer allowed them to make a web browser that could display 'normal' web pages. Up until then everyone had been dicking around with mobile web sites and the lack of ubiquity and cost of doing so... as well as the often hamfisted attempts to assume why you were on the website from mobile... all of these hamstrung mobile browsing adoption.

With this in place commerce could begin on the phone. Once everyone added mobile pay options it could end there as well. An now everyone has one, if they can.

My mom had a touch-capable phone with a resistive touchscreen and hated it. Her fingernails were not huge or anything but they were long enough she had to press with the pad of her finger, not the tip, and it crippled her accuracy.

I think you're right. Speed is a component of the User Experience. My point in writing this is that when you abstract to a higher level, the beauty of the UX was that you can instantly do whatever you want. Your thought -> your touch -> action.

However, I think you make a great point that the two are interrelated.

My straw man starting point would be: A poor user experience that is lightning fast can still be a great experience.

But a great user experience that lags or is slow will typically not be successful.

The iphone succeeded because it coupled a great user experience that was so fast that it felt like interacting with objects in the real world.

AOL was very successful, even though it was slow and laggy, and calling the UX “meh” is being generous.

The iPhone won because it looked amazing and had the App Store. Looks and features. How did you reach the conclusion that it was speed?

The app store for native apps come around a year after the iPhone.

So? That was an early adopter year. For the vast majority of people, the iPhone has always had an App Store.

Actually, that supports my point. The App Store came by because people wanted it. No one said: “oh no bloat my phone will slow down”.

I think you’re talking on a different level of granularity. What was really different? “The UX” sounds generic. Whereas Speed is very specific. Speed is part of the UX.

It would help me at least if you could specify/ list what you think were the things in UX that made it so much better than Symbian phones.

One word : Gestures.

We can think of things like slide to unlock but much more importantly scrolling. If something shows more the mastery of the iphone UX of that time it is definitely scrolling, who categories it as gesture now? It's completely normalized, on all other Platform of that time, you had to play with arrows and the scroll bar. Now every platform has it.

Ah very good. Yes, I agree. Simple things like a scroll bar in a browser window right? I remember how difficult it was to tap that small little icon on the lower right corner of the screen. They simple copied mouse behavior onto the phones. And Apple that this out from a 0-level perspective. Thanks for the insight!

Using a touchscreen pre-iPhone usually felt like executing commands on a computer application.

Using an iPhone felt like directly manipulating the underlying content. It was a qualitatively different experience that only superficially resembled previous touchscreen devices insofar as it used similar input hardware.

Note that Apple didn't invent the concept of a responsive UI thread with physics-based UI metaphors, for example Jeff Han demonstrated a fairly sophisticated example at TED2006[1] the year before. But to my knowledge the iPhone was the first mass-produced device with a direct manipulation interface.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th...

Maybe. But the author says speed IS the killer feature (for products) so it has to be true at the higher level too. UX is the perception of the user of the product and their, well, experience using the product. If it's generic it's because it really is that generic, because users won't know why exactly they like a product.

But in the case of iOS vs Symbian:

- as others said: capacitive touch screen (this is not an OS issue, but iphone was among the firsts to use it, definitely earlier than Nokia). This is huge. Like the thing that everyone was talking about (around me) when the original iphone came out is how you could swipe to see the pictures. And it wasn't just for paging, it defined how you could interact with the phone (think pinch zooming, and rotation - not sure when these were added).

- the touch screen UI itself. Nokia played around with the touch UI before, but never really liked it. It was expressed several times internally, that touch is just a no go. But no wonder: the resistive touch screen is pretty bad, but also Symbian itself was built on the assumption that all you have is keys while iOS was built with touch UI in mind from the very beginning. (Now, of course touch was added to Symbian, but that's just not the same. Or they didn't put in the effort. Nokia even had an experimental touch phone released to the market in 2003, the 7700[1], but it was mostly ridiculous.)

- the UI just was a lot more polished, looked better, classier, the graphics was better. They had OpenGL and probably a graphics accelerator - nothing like that in Symbian, of course. (It even took the android guys by surprise, I remember reading/hearing in an interview that when they saw a demo or the release, they've realized that they had to redo the UI from scratch. Because before that they had this Blackberry-ish/Symbianish idea, they thought they were competing with that.)

- I'm pretty sure it had a better browser.

And this pretty much defines the experience, the feel a user gets from the phone. It couldn't send or receive MMS-es (some people may have used it then, but most I guess just wanted to have the feature), it couldn't receive 'push' email. I.e. you had to manually refresh your inbox, emails didn't just arrive. It didn't even have apps. Symbian had all these. It has had these for years then. It even had an app store like thing (at least you had to send in your app for verification which would then be signed by Nokia or it couldn't be installed - that was a new thing around 2004-2006, something I think nobody really did before).

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_7700-570.php

My follow up question would be: Would a capacitive touch screen with 0.5s latency have made this the killer feature? Or did the capacitive touch screen enable high speed input?

I'd argue the latter, but it could be a question of framing?

I don't know. Again: I think the killer feature was the whole UX. Slow response times is definitely disturbing. (All my android phones got into this state sometimes.) You just don't get that feeling, but it couldn't possible happen to iphone because the the UX was the center of the whole product. I'm not an apple fan (never had an iphone, and the early ones kept pissing me off when friends asked for help) but it's obvious that they are obsessed about UX and polishing the UI.

But you are right that the capacitive display itself makes the interaction faster because it's enough to touch while the resistive has to be pressed. So it's probably slower and feels like you have to put in more effort.

I'd say based on the number of friends I have who use old or cheap Android phones with terrible latency, it really was the touch screen and UI/UX that played the main role.

Sure, for many, iPhones are still preferred because of the low latency, so it matters, but I suspect the iPhone would've done just as well if the latency was bad. The competition was about finger vs keys/pencil, not latency.

Thanks for the details. I remember the capacitive screens. They were awful! :)

Well, capacitive is what we have today. The old ones, that you actually had to push (and not just touch) were resistive :)

I meant those!

We see this time and time again where technology needs to be introduced multiple times before it gets adopted. The killer app is always use case.

It helps that the iPhone was a iPod with a phone attached, instead of a phone with a multi-use compute device attached.

OG iPods were single purpose music players, and features that made sense were slowly introduced over time (and were optional). Adding support for photo viewing made sense because album art is universal and well, album art is no different than a photo. Adding video made sense because you have this nice color screen for showing the photos/album art, and music videos are a thing people enjoy. Then adding a camera make sense, because you can already view photos/videos. Once you have all that in one package, adding phone capabilities makes a lot of sense when you realize that people are carrying around iPods along with a cellphone.

I think it's partly that but it is also a matter of timing.

If we can consider the iPhone to be innovative, we cannot overstate how much timing was important.

The iPhone was a phone with a big screen optimized for the internet. Regarding people who are not into technology,for what I can see, their main interest to go for the smartphone has been whatsapp and free phoning in general. And as time went on, more and more services of all kind including administrative ones where more participial to use on the internet that in real life.

The iPhone “did a lot less” than competing phones but the vast majority of users with an iPhone could do a lot more with the iPhone than they could with a competing phone.

I had a Sony Clié PDA which ran .swf flash games and the home screen had a grid of icons much like the iPhone 1 home screen. It was a gorgeous full screen display with touch and stylus. This predated iPhone by a few years.

Any else have a PDA and see the glaring opportunity to add cellular functionality to them?

I never saw (or see) the need to combine them. Early 2000s I figured in-ear phones (headset minus the phone) would be a thing Real Soon(tm), and then a PDA would be all I need to be productive. I still miss Palm and the apps available on it. Naturally, there is benefit to a connected PDA, but cellular? I wouldn't miss it, if my phone was just my headset.

It was actually kind of slow at the time, especially it’s network connection. I agree the UX was a game changer. Big screen and responsive touchscreen made it a joy to use. For me, google maps in my pocket was the killer feature, and it worked well even without GPS.