Ask HN: What Was the iPhone Release Like? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Was the iPhone Release Like?

6 pointsnharada9 comments

There's no question the iPhone changed computing, but as someone who was too young/not plugged into tech enough at the time to remember, I'm curious what the release was like.

How far in advance (if at all) were touch smartphones viewed as a revolutionary piece of technology? Was there similar hype to tech hailed today as a "revolution" that hasn't yet made large impact, for example AR/VR, self driving, etc or was it a surprise? What did you personally think?

View on HN

The iPhone was highly, highly anticipated. For years, people were conjecturing about it. In 2006, Dan Lyons, under the pseudonym "Fake Steve Jobs", joked coincidentally that the iPhone would have only one button: "Our designers tell me we need at least 12 buttons so we can have all the numbers plus * and # symbols. I’m telling them to go back and do it over. I want one button. No more, no less. One."[1]

One of the reasons for all this speculation is that smartphones totally sucked back then.

Russell Beattie, one of the main mobile/smartphone bloggers at the time, wrote a great piece in 2004: "Steve Jobs has a mobile phone. I'm not sure which mobile phone it is, but he's definltely got one. And he hates it. He curses at it every day. He hates it like he hated the original IBM PC. He hates how hard it is to add contacts and make calls and he cringes at the web experience and the Java games, if he's even bothered to try them. He holds it in his hand during long trips and admires some things about it, but knows he could do it better. He knows that if Apple decided to make a mobile phone, it would be the most intuitive and elegant mobile phone in the world."[2]

It's hard to understand how bad the situation was without actually using the mobile computing technology that existed at the time. In the late 90's, I had owned a couple generations of Palm PDAs, which were pretty good, but I stopped carrying a PDA around because I didn't want to fill my pockets with both a Palm and a Nokia flip phone. I started developing mobile apps in 2002 (mostly BREW/J2ME, later Blackberry/Symbian/WinMo), so I was in the industry and had access to literally 100's of phones of every type. They were all terrible. By the late-2000's I had been waiting 7 years for a phone that was as sleek and usable as a Palm PDA.

My work phone was a Samsung Blackjack (Windows Mobile). If the screen brightness was set to anything bright enough so it was visible indoors in a brightly lit room, the battery would die in 3 hrs. Even when I dimmed it so it was hard to read (indoors, mind you), the battery life was barely over 4 hours. It was slow and flakey, and I only used it to read email occasionally.

My personal phone was a Sony Ericsson M600. I bought it in 2006 despite knowing Symbian was terrible (based on my experiences with Series 60 and 90 devices), because I had gotten tired of waiting for a decent smartphone, and this one was thin enough to fit easily in a pocket. But it sucked. Totally unreadable screen outdoors. Unusable as a pocket computer.

You'd hear nice things about Danger Hiptop/Sidekick, but that was mostly due to the ease of typing on the keyboard. Same with Blackberry keyboard along with the scroll wheel. Usability-wise, the Palm Treo was nice, but it was fat and clunky, with a non-preemptive OS that kept crashing. Oh also, people liked those phones because they were much, much better at messaging. On WinMo and Symbian, text messages used to be like email. You could not view your text conversation with a person in one scrolling view -- instead, incoming messages went to an inbox, and your outgoing messages were in a sent folder.

So when I saw the iPhone keynote in 2007, I was blown away. It looked amazing. I was not expecting a non-stylus phone. I had no doubt that I'd get one, but at $700, it was out of my budget. A few months later Apple dropped the price to $400 so then I immediately bought one, and it was just amazing in hand as in the keynote.

It was interesting how there were a lot of people who were still skeptical about the iPhone. It took years before it seemed to dawn on everyone in the industry that the iPhone would destroy Nokia, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile.

Every phone manufacturer was desperately trying to make a touchscreen phone that was anywhere near as good, but it took them years to figure it out, and some never did. They were quick to copy the form factor with a big touchscreen, but there were so many details that made the whole experience. It wasn't just the touch UI or things like the dynamic keyboard's dynamic touch areas, there were numerous other aspects that didn't get copied until years later. The non-user-replaceable battery life. The way a photosensor adjusted the screen brightness based on ambient light, and turned off the screen when pressed against your ear. The debate over capacitive vs resistive touchscreen technology [3].

There are very few times I've seen something that was as totally disruptive. You might have been too young to remember the iPhone in 2007, but you might be more aware of how Tesla Model S was winning street races and winning safety awards, until finally all the automotive manufacturers capitulated and announced plans to start building EVs? And certainly you're aware of SpaceX's rise to dominance in the space launch market, or how Starlink is disrupting satellite internet service. The iPhone was sort of like that, but the competition was much worse, if you can imagine that.

[1] https://www.fakesteve.net/2006/09/tabula-rasa.html [2] https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008182 [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20100327033813/http://labs.moto....

Great read. Thanks for the write up.

What were Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and LG using as an OS at the time? Was it also some Java variant or did they use own OSs?

What company were you working for that gave you access to so many phones at once?

Did you ever work with Japanese phones models (NEC, Kyocera, etc.)?

While you've said quite a bit about how easy the Palm was to use, which was the best one to work with? Or, at least, which one would have been a hacker's choice.

> What were Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and LG using as an OS at the time? Was it also some Java variant or did they use own OSs?

Non-smartphones had a proprietary OS (to handle the phone functionality, SMS, contacts, call history), but licensed Sun's J2ME and/or Qualcomm's BREW to run downloadable apps/games. I don't recall those manufacturers having smartphones before 2007.

> What company were you working for that gave you access to so many phones at once?

I worked for two mobile game publishers, Mforma (renamed to Hands-On Mobile) and Digital Chocolate. Prior to smartphones, mobile operators/carriers ran phone app stores like game consoles. They partnered with select game publishers to stock their app stores. Premiere publishers had to commit to deliver multiple games per month and support a minimum number of phones. For example, our delivery commitment to just one US carrier (Verizon) was two new games per month, supporting over 40 handsets. The handset list got updated every month. We received new phones weekly. By 2010 we had huge boxes filled with old discontinued phones and their proprietary chargers. Every carrier had unique handsets, each handset had unique bugs that thwarted you from putting a generic game build on it. It wasn't just differing screen sizes, they'd have different codes from the keyboards, vastly different memory and speed configurations. Because of these kinds of demands, during the 2000's mobile game publishers went through consolidation and acquisition of mobile game studios all over the world -- e.g. Mforma had studios in Manchester and Seoul; DChoc had studios in Finland and Barcelona, and set up porting shops in Bangalore and Mexicali. Supercell (Clash of Clans) was formed by former DChoc developers at the Finland studio.

> Did you ever work with Japanese phones models (NEC, Kyocera, etc.)?

Not really, only rare ones that were offered by US carriers, and only to port a game to it. But in 1999, I was in Japan at a reunion (I attended high school in Yokohama) and had a chance to play with a couple phones there. They were cool, very slim phones with all kinds of functionality.

> While you've said quite a bit about how easy the Palm was to use, which was the best one to work with? Or, at least, which one would have been a hacker's choice.

There were other different PDA platforms like Msft PocketPC and Sony Clié, but I had developed an app only for PalmOS. It was possible to use GCC[1], but I bought Metrowerks Codewarrior. I suppose nowadays that's like buying an IntelliJ IDEA license. (BTW, when I got into doing BREW development, the compiler cost $2500, and that was after a discount that Qualcomm got from ARM for a special limited-function edition of their compiler.)

Here's an example of how phone platforms were so behind on computing. PalmOS had its contacts/calendar/notes functionality on device but you could also run that on Windows/Mac in an environment called Palm Desktop. It wasn't obvious to phone manufacturers that they had to do anything similar. In 2005 I had a Nokia 6620 (Symbian Series 60), and accidentally deleted a contact. To restore it from a backup was convoluted. The last backup I had was a couple months old. It was a monolithic binary image that restored in one block to the phone, wiping out any information that was entered after the backup was made. So first I had backup the phone, restore the older backup, get the one phone number that I needed, then restore the backup I'd just made, and type in the phone number into the phone again. Later they developed something like Palm Desktop but it was years later.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000819061955/http://www.palmos...

Was your Treo also a Windows Mobile device or the PalmOS version?

Didn't RIM perfect the convergence of PDA and phone or did Blackberries have their own issues?

Were those proprietary OSs a form of *nix, TRON, or something else entirely? I thought Motorola's RAZR phones, like the Sony Ericssons, licensed Symbian from Nokia, but I could be mistaken.

How deep into the hardware were you when you were building games for those platforms (e.g. ARM asm, special undocumented microcode, etc.)?

Were gaming phones like the N-Gage or Xperia any better than their purely mobile counterparts in coding or feature-set?

While you had those Japanese phones in your hand, did you try iMode or play any games on them? Any models that were notable to you in '99? Any features you were hoping would make it stateside?

Did you ever work on older mobile systems like the Apple Newton, EPOC32, and GEOS/Palmtop PCs?

Lots of questions :) Were you working in the space at the time?

> Was your Treo also a Windows Mobile device or the PalmOS version?

I'd given up on Palm long before they switched to WinMo. But it that was computing history repeating itself, where previously Apple's problems with System 7 led to the consideration of BeOS, Solaris, and eventually the acquisition of NeXT.

> Didn't RIM perfect the convergence of PDA and phone or did Blackberries have their own issues?

Blackberries were perfect as messaging devices. The carriers had a special class of messaging devices to be sold to customers who wanted hardware qwerty keyboards. Blackberries were definitely best-in-class of that category.

But it was simply a different story once there was a phone with a near desktop-class browser, not to mention a GPU, and a pre-emptive OS with memory-protection, whose system developers who had years of experience with a similar OS. The phone manufacturers were simply out-classed. It doesn't surprise me that Google was the one to step up (or, well, the Danger/Android guys), because you had to have that kind of expertise to match Apple. Even then, it took Google until about 2012-2013 before Android was nearly on-par with iPhone. When Jobs said Apple had a 5 year lead on everyone else, he nailed it.

> Were those proprietary OSs a form of *nix, TRON, or something else entirely? I thought Motorola's RAZR phones, like the Sony Ericssons, licensed Symbian from Nokia, but I could be mistaken.

No idea about the proprietary OSes. The early RAZR always struck me as a digital form of the analog StarTac. It was amazingly thin, but not great for anything else. It looks like there was a Linux version [1]. And you're right, in 2009 there was a Symbian/UIQ version [2].

> How deep into the hardware were you when you were building games for those platforms (e.g. ARM asm, special undocumented microcode, etc.)?

Not at all. You could code in assembly for BREW, and some game developers I knew did that for a few inner loop routines, but I never bothered. As far as access to phone internals, you pretty much needed a special relationship with the manufacturers. The game publishers I worked for did get pre-loads on phones, and sometimes that did require some hardware-specific work. Once when Nokia was attempting to make CDMA phones, we got preloads on one of their phones and I found out that their version of the OS had no way to relocate memory so everything had to be pre-allocated a special way. Before I worked for the game publishers, I worked on MobiTV's BREW client and they got some kind of preload deal with Qualcomm, which led to me getting access to their hardware video decoder, but it had an API. It was a little annoying because it wasn't designed for streaming, so the entire chunk of video had to be fully downloaded before it would play.

> Were gaming phones like the N-Gage or Xperia any better than their purely mobile counterparts in coding or feature-set?

Yes, but we never made special games for them. The N-Gage could run J2ME, and so we just ported J2ME games to it, even pre-loads.

> While you had those Japanese phones in your hand, did you try iMode or play any games on them? Any models that were notable to you in '99? Any features you were hoping would make it stateside?

Honestly I had a hard time understanding what I was looking at. One friend had one that looked more like a short colorful ruler than a phone. She hung it from her purse with trinkets hanging off of it. At the time ('98-2000) I was living in Sāo Paulo, consulting for BCP Telecomunicações (now Claro Brasil) on one of the largest cellular deployments of its time (later to be dwarfed by ones in China and India), and the phones in Japan were utterly different from anything in Brazil or the US. Japanese phone culture was so alien at the time, the way people accessorized them and messaged each other. Emojis didn't exist elsewhere.

> Did you ever work on older mobile systems like the Apple Newton, EPOC32, and GEOS/Palmtop PCs?

Nope. I mostly worked on PC games during the 90's. I did have an Apple Newton though. I think I might still have it, somewhere in a box in storage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Razr2 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Razr3

I'm probably younger than you think I am. The iPhone launched into the public eye about the time I had launched into adolescence but I didn't purchase my own until several years later. I just happen to have an interest in older tech and, while retrocomputing contributed has to the appreciation of former dream computers like Amigas, Ataris, Quadro Macs, and SGI workstations, it seems to have elided the more recent history of cell phone software. A history I had been a participant in but one unaware at the time of how the sausage was being made. It wasn't until several years later, after bearing the brunt of the Lumia's slow death, did I travel down the rabbit hole of phone OSes and the hardly remembered Flash-lite and J2ME games of my teen years.

1997-2007 was for mobile phones what the '60s were for mainframes, the '70s for minicomputers, the '80s for microcomputers, and (much to the dismay of IBM, Apple, et al.) the '90's for Windows PCs and video games as a whole: an inventive period of try-everything-at-least-once that can't really be recaptured. It led to all sorts of trends, some functional, some crazy (especially the Galapagos phones in Japan), some that stuck around, and some that will remain unique to the era. It's kind of disappointing to see how much of that development history is now quite difficult to rediscover and catalog. And it will be all the more difficult as time goes on. I'm just fortunate to have caught your attention when I did. You're the first person I've heard from who has first-hand experience of the backend of the cellphone industry during it's heyday.

This is an awesome response, thanks for so much detail!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com