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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

In his defense, the main objections he has are the price, the lack of a physical keyboard, and the fact that Apple had never sold a phone before. In hindsight those seem funny, but in 2007 you would have heard those same talking points everywhere.

If only we all had decided collectively that 500$ really was too much for a phone. No it’s like no one even checks the price tag because their carrier is slowly milking it out of them instead.

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> No it’s like no one even checks the price tag because their carrier is slowly milking it out of them instead.

Eh, iPhones are still popular in many countries where paying outright for your phone is the norm.

And thanks to those people who have to have the newest shiny-shiny and allow themselves to be 'milked' that I can pick up a few years old ex-flagship model on eBay for a couple of hundred £££ or less. So long may it continue.

It might've seem funny to those that hadn't seen the future in 2002.

I had a SonyEricsson p900 (The p800, p900 and p910 series was released from 2002-2005) and it had a numpad for quick dialling, but for "smart" usage you really only used the touchscreen that covered most of the front real-estate (and a dial-knob for navigation since they hadn't figured out how to make UI's like Apple did later).

By 2006 however though I was looking to upgrade but SE chickened out and released successors (P990,M600,W950) that _decreased_ touch-screen realestate in favour of num/keypads on the front. It's really sad that they had everything in their hands but fubbed out totally.

But by 2007 the time was definetly right for the iPhone, disappointed by SE I began looking around and there was some "open" phone with touchscreen as well as that LG Prada. I even made a sketch of an ideal device a few weeks before Jobs came on screen.

Late 2006 sketch.. https://whizzter.woorlic.org/jonasphone.jpg

And yes, about as soon as iPhone 3G went on sale in Sweden I got one.

I still miss my two last physical keyboard phones. Nokia E71 [0] as my last pre-Android/Apple-era phone, and HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 in the USA) [1] as my first Android.

Thinking about it, I’d love an updated E71. Small, high-res touch screen, Lineage OS or something similar, physical keyboard. But that would be niche enough that it’d probably be very expensive for what it is.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E71

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

He might be laughing on screen, but internally he was panicking. By the next year he had dismissed Peter Knook and installed myerson and shuttered windows mobile 7 to completely rebuild from scratch windows phone 7.

As far as I remember, in those days here you often paid nothing or very little out of pocket for a new phone. It was more like an extra 10-20EUR on your monthly subscription. At least for the phones normal people had.

It was the same in the US, you could get a new phone for $199 every two years, without any additional statement charge.

However it all changed after T-Mobile’s “uncarrier” bluff, now it’s all about lock you in 36 months with monthly payments and some credit against the payments.

It was also a "smart phone" with no data connectivity. Not much use giving it all these features and leaving it with a 2G radio stack.

2G has mobile data (via GPRS/EDGE) and the original iPhone absolutely supported it.

You could browse the web on cheap phones much earlier, but the rendering engines were limited (some mobile subset of HTML?). A big selling point of the iPhone was that it included a full browser.

I used to browse the Web with Opera Mini, which was a J2ME midlet, on feature phones such as Motorola C651 and Nokia 6230i :) It worked by rendering the full blown site server-side and sending it back in a simplified format for the phone to display, which worked much better than bundled browsers which weren't very useful for much more than WML or XHTML-MP. I have also chatted with people via XMPP extensively thanks to Bombus (remember when Google Talk was a fine, open and federated XMPP implementation and pretty much everyone was reachable there? Those were the times...).

Smartphones such as Symbian ones already had more usable native browsers though.

Yes, but it was 64kbps at most, when everywhere had 8Mbps 3G coverage.

EDGE goes up to 384Kbps, and everywhere most certainly did not have 8Mbps 3G coverage in 2007.

https://www.wired.com/2008/08/global-iphone-3/

Even in the remotest corners of Europe we had absolutely romping 3G coverage.

3G sure was pretty common in 2007. US was always behind when it comes to cellular networks.

> European T-Mobile users reported the fastest 3G Download Speeds: 1,822 Kbps on average.

Getting 8Mb was rare, hence the link. The other poster is taking the theoretical maximum for 3G, and understating 2G, rather than just admitting that his original statement - that the first iPhone didn't have mobile data at all - was just wrong.

Yeah, but effective 2Mbps was a pretty decent connection speed in 2007, while theoretical maximum of 384Kbps was already underwhelming. Source: I used 2G data around that time extensively :)

2G had full internet access, it's just that every smartphone until the iphone had _terrible_ browsers. I had a Windows Mobile 5 device and it was pretty bad, like using IE6 again but low resolution, extremely slow, and navigating with a horrid little joystick to select links.

The first few iPhones also had terrible browsers. When my dad got one in ~2008, Safari would consistently crash 5 seconds after loading apple.com as soon as an animation was triggered. Still a hell of an improvement over my Razr flip phone’s browser.

And around that time, Firefox was being ported to Maemo, being essentially a full-blown browser with mobile UI. It worked on Nokia N810 and N900 first and was ported to Android afterwards, serving there for a few years still before it got reimplemented with Android native APIs.

Maemo also came with their own MicroB browser that utilized Gecko engine already and performed really well.

It was unbelievably slow, and everyone was already on 3G by the time the first iPhone launched.

It's hardly slow. Just checked local plans for what I get for $20/mo prepaid and it's about $150usd/mo for one of those awful folding things.

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