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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

I never hear people mention the Palm Treo. Apple gets all the credit for inventing smartphones with the iPhone 1st gen, but the Treo preceded it by years. Is it not the first smartphone?

One of my first startups was based on Treos, they were awesome devices. Very snappy.

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There were tons of "smartphones" before Apple - Blackberries were very common and famous - Apple, if anything, took the lead in designing a workable "touchscreen only" interface.

I'd argue that Apple's big "innovation" was the capacitive touch screen, that made the UI so much more fluid and responsive. Palm almost shipped a webOS device with a resistive touch screen, but pivoted away after Rubenstein took the reigns. The Treo was a great device for its time, but suddenly felt old fashioned after the iPhone came out -- even though iOS was significantly less capable in its initial implementation (modal notifications, no copy/paste, no apps, etc...)

The capacitive touch screen was necessary but alone wouldn’t have meant much without the revolutionizing software stack. You may think “revolutionizing” seems hyperbolic here but a lot of people forget or don't realize how truly far behind the competition was.

Software keyboards were considered a complete no-go, even by folks within Apple (Ken Kocienda's “Creative Selection” is a great read on the development of the keyboard). Dragging / flinging / pinch to zoom didn’t exist anywhere else or if it did, only in prototype or proof-of-concept form. The capacitive screen unlocked these features but no one else knew how to build them.

I was working at Sony Ericsson when the first iPhone was released. I distinctly remember holding it in my hand and using mobile Safari for the first time and thinking... “we’re fucked”. The company simply didn’t have the engineering chops needed to catch up. Later on Android would provide a possible solution but we managed to screw things up even with a full OS handed to us.

LG Prada had a big capacitive screen pre-iPhone.[1] What Apple did well was bring everything together.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Yeah the touchscreen was the first that "worked" like you expected it to - before the best screens were the ones with styluses which could work well, but was a piece to lose/harder to use at a glance.

They also had the first browser that wasn’t severely crippled by compromises based on d-pad and extremely inaccurate touch input. Before iphone, the mobile web was a sad joke.

Opera Mobile (not Mini) for Symbian S60 with its d-pad bag of tricks was surprisingly usable with desktop websites, just crippled by a very low-res screen. Too bad it seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth even before Presto was abandoned.

I had some amazingly expensive Nokia 900 series phone that had WebKit on it for testing something for work (no way I was going to carry that monstrosity) and I remember it being impressive that it could actually faithfully render real pages. Still had garbage d-pad interaction.

I remember that - a huge advantage of the original Safari is it would show desktop versions of many websites; back then mobile sites were absolute trash. And it was usable because you could pinch + zoom.

Yeah, the touchscreen was the biggest innovation. But the mobile web experience was also head-and-shoulders above anything that came before it, and it was also able to leverage the success it had with iPod and iTunes to make things smoother on the software/syncing side.

In many ways the iPhone was the first modern smartphone.

You can pretty easily draw a line and see stuff designed before the iPhone largely looked like the Treo or the Blackberry. Things designed after largely looked like the iPhone.

The Treo was more of a Palm Pilot with a cell phone built in, or the same but Windows Mobile PDA. The Blackberry was a two-way pager expanded into a cell phone.

The iPhone was sort of designed from the ground up to be a smart phone (the Sidekick may fit this too).

The Treo was nice (never got to have one) but it’s kind of a different generation. The iPhone generation (along with Android) is when smartphones exploded in popularity.

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