The only people in the industry who seemed to get it were the Android team. It took Microsoft 3 years to realise they actually needed to go back to the drawing board on their mobile tech stack.
iPhone announcement: January 2007
Android release: October 2008
Windows Phone 7 release: October 2010
Also I'm not under any delusion that MS would have gotten it right. The same reasoning that led them to do the minimal changes from Windows -> Windows CE would have likely always been a drag on them fully embracing letting go and making the necessary changes.
Blackberry, Palm, and Apple all realized that given hardware and interface limitations, a better solution was to cut the Gordian knot and strike a different balance between desktop and something else.
Honestly, any of the three had a shot at being Apple. Palm had Graffiti and really slick for the time OSs. Blackberry had iMessage of their own. But Apple had a more complete package + Apple fans + iTunes.
Because I remember having a Windows Mobile device and it was fairly powerful. You could do more on it than you could on Android or iOS for many years.
You can't make this sh!t up!
This insanity reached it's peak just before the iPhone introduction with Microsoft's "Ultra Mobile PC" handheld device initiative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC
I can remember an implementation of this from ASUS that used a D-Pad to drive a mouse pointer on a handheld device running an unchanged Windows XP UI.
The answer was that the Netscape icons looked different from Microsoft’s so lack of training costs would make MS cheaper. Sounds like bullshit but back then there was enormous learned helplessness when it came to anything computerish. Walk to any desk in most companies and there would be a stack of books to explain it all.
One of the best things about the iPhone was that it jettisoned all that crap and acknowledged that people aren’t idiots. The stores still offered free “training” for the fearful.
* strange, I know, as they were rarely fair to others.
That made it look like an odd duck in the sea of computerphones, but what it had was a slick user interface completely designed around the capabilities of capacitive screens, and that took many years for the competition to even get close to.
Good user interfaces are truly hard, and Apple has always put it front and center, so it must have made sense for them.
I had a similar experience when they went to WP10. While WP8 was a fast, stable and highly usable OS, WP10 was a dumpster fire (for me as a user, cannot talk about underpinnings). Constant crashes, slow, terrible battery life. This was a widely shared experience among WP10 users as far as I know. And on top of that there was another software transition that all but guaranteed no apps properly jumped to the new platform. Looking back on it I think jumping to WP10 instead of carefully incrementing WP8 was the big mistake, and rolling out WP8 without a way to make the transition easier on existing WP7 buyers was the lesser one.
I don’t think a perfect execution would have saved microsoft though: they would have always been third and it is pretty clear developers cannot support more than two mobile platforms properly. The app situation would have always been bad, and without all of the popular apps a smartphone is dead in the water.
On the phone, peoples social media was all integrated into one hub and while great for the user, it reduced the platforms to a transport layer - which did not appeal to them. Youtube was a big deal at the time, and didn't want their app on the new competitors platform. Microsoft wrote some, and they were taking offline. On the Windows phone, it would have been a few steps away from a storage platform.
Microsoft had a brand reputation problem at the time. Windows is what your parents used for work. Apple had an emotional connection of being fresh and hip. They had the iPod and people dancing in silhouette.
iTunes was available on Mac. You could run it on Windows, if you shut everything else down - the thing was a massive resource hog. I'm so scarred by it that even owning a Mac now I never user it.
The Zune app was a joy to use in comparison. I used Zune app for years without even owning a Zune. You had to use iTunes to sync your iPod. The older portable MP3 players were storage devices that you just copied files onto the device.
The end user experience was not the problem.
edit: some of this might be slightly inaccurate since I'm going from memory here. Happy to be corrected by someone who remembers better than I.
Perhaps it was a combination of that text based tab control or it was the black & white + flat + text design they adopted for live tile and for the UI controls.
It's been a while, so it's possible that it wasn't as bad as I remember it.
Android source code is publicly available, with time stamps. You can read it and see how little had to change to make it a touch first ux.
Android had to add multi-touch events, make the default controls bigger, and add inertial scrolling to the list views. They didn’t even have to add a soft keyboard, because the first few gens of phones had physical keyboards.
> Android had to add multi-touch events, make the default controls bigger, and add inertial scrolling to the list views. They didn’t even have to add a soft keyboard, because the first few gens of phones had physical keyboards.
Whether or not it was a lot of code, multi-touch was a revolutionary new UI paradigm and a beautiful symbiosis between well tuned hardware and software. I don’t think its importance should be trivialized and the iPhone was undoubtedly the catalyst that brought Fingerworks’s invention to the masses.
LG prada phone demo from 15 years ago: https://youtu.be/5mo7Ab6ZcJ4
There were lots and lots of other small details that Apple got it right. And I said it the first time I saw the iPhone, what sets them apart was Apple was trying to make an iPhone like an Appliance. While all other Smartphones was trying to cramp a computer inside a Phone factor. The day I saw iPhone I knew that was it. The Smartphone I have been looking for. Strange it is 15 years already.
I still dont know why the Visual Voicemail patents had not expired. It really should be the standard on all network.
Yes, really.
>[Google] had been working with prototypes for six months and had planned a launch by the end of the year . . . until Jobs took the stage to unveil the iPhone.
Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”
“What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
Chris is talking about the Sooner: https://www.androidcentral.com/look-back-google-sooner-first.... It was called Sooner because it was going to come to market "sooner" than the other, more advanced, Dream prototype. After the iPhone announcement Sooner was canceled, in favor of the "Dream" prototype, which eventually shipped in a modified form as the G1.
The _software_ difference between non-touch Sooner and the touch-capable G1 were relatively minor. Same OS, same view system, same application framework.
As I recall, Chris's role at the time was as a UX focused engineer, so perhaps from his POV it was a massive redesign. But if you consider Android as a whole, relatively little changed. I recall the apps being pretty easy to port over to support touch. (Moving to a bigger screen helped offset the problem of having to make the buttons way larger.)
Android being worked on is very different from Android being anything at all like what it ended up being.
It literally took years before Android was in the same league.
Here's cnet's review (literally just the first link I pulled from Google).
"But still, the G1 doesn't quite offer the mass appeal and ease of use as the iPhone, so it won't be a good fit for someone making the jump from a regular mobile to their first smartphone." https://www.cnet.com/reviews/t-mobile-g1-review/