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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

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> Nobody gave a shit about smart phones before the iphone.

2 out of 3 isn't bad, but this is revisionist history, and simply wrong. Nokia dominated the pre-iPhone smartphone market with Symbian phones, which supported 3G for years before the first iPhone, which didn't even have 3G.

And are we assuming that Blackberries aren't "smartphones"? Because I think they probably are.

Blackberries are very borderline. They could do some things but really they were just an extension of regular phones with a big keyboard. There wasn’t really anything “smart” about them. Sure you could browse the web but with a keyboard so it was trash.

Read some Wikipedia pages instead of coming up your own version of the world history.

What was trash about the blackberry? The browser wasn't great, but the keyboard was excellent from what I remember.

Not saying it didn't exist, but that it wasn't mainstream. Ask your mother if she's ever heard of Symbian phones...

>Ask your mother if she's ever heard of Symbian phones...

Ask your mother if she's heard of Variable Valve Timing or the equivalent for her brand of car OR ask her if she knows Linux or... for that matter ask yourself if you know the OS on Nokia 3310? Most mothers don't even know what a OS is.

Edit: The OS is called "Series 40".

The difference is we're talking about a product category that has penetrated culture in a meaningful way, rather than tech that is meaningful to people with specialized knowledge.

iPhone was ground zero for the general public consciousness in this space, it made this product category mainstream. It's silly to argue otherwise.

Also variable valve timing was plastered on trunks of cars in the 80s so folks of a certain age should recognize the term, and Linux as a term seems pervasive enough that most people should at least have heard of it; they likely have no idea what those terms actually mean though.

She's certainly heard of Nokia phones, the majority of which (in later years) ran Symbian.

People associate Nokia with 3310. No-one associates it with smartphones.

That is a very US perspective. Nokia absolutely dominated the European market up to the 2010s.

Nokia brick phones dominated the US market in the early 2000s. I’ve never seen a Symbian outside of magazines and internet tech writers. Symbian lost to iOS and Android within 2 years of release.

Not to mention developers were never going to create apps for the platform.

What are you talking about? Symbian came out a decade before iPhone and was very widespread. Maybe you mean the Maemo operating system used in N900?

This comment could be improved by addressing parents rather than mothers.

>Ask your parent if they've ever heard of Symbian phones

definitely wasn't an improvement

> Nobody gave a shit about smart phones before the iphone.

Too much hyperbole. Perhaps 50% of people cared before iPhone and 100% after iPhone.

In the case of VR, it's more like 5% before Apple and ... 10% after?

I don't think Meta's issue with proper VR takeoff is because people weren't willing to try a VR headset. People did try and buy headsets, and most people thought it was cool but after a couple weeks it's a novelty that's not worth the buy-in of putting on a headset every time you want to use it. You can make a VR headset as luxury as you want, but if it doesn't provide enough value to make it worth strapping a thing to your face, people won't want to use it.

For a VR headset to actually succeed, it needs to be a thing where when you're using a traditional non-VR computer, you wish you were using the headset because it enabled you to do so much more.

What an awful everything comment.

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