It's hard to overstate just how big of a leap the iPhone was.
Critics only focused on the shortcomings but neglected to see what it really was.
Steve Jobs Introducing at Macworld in 2007 is a classic for the ages.
Steve Jobs Introducing at Macworld in 2007 is a classic for the ages.
To date, the biggest single advancement in the mobile web has been Apple porting their open-source WebKit to iPhoneOS (as Jobs put it: “a desktop-class browser”). Nothing else even comes close. Before the iPhone came out, the mobile web was virtually synonymous with shitty m.example.com WAP sites nobody wanted. In the space of about a year, everybody commissioning a website was asking for real, responsive mobile websites that worked on an iPhone.
> Critics only focused on the shortcomings but neglected to see what it really was.
Critics were sure the iPhone wouldn’t be a success until Mobile Safari supported Flash. They were certain Jobs would back down. About five years later, Adobe gave up on Flash on mobile.
*edit: i say ridiculous as the iphone still made it look totally crap
Point being, it's fine to say "sure, it's missing cut-and-paste, but not hard to see how that's a really insignificant nit for most people that will easily be addressed in a subsequent software update," but all too often I see tech reporters latch on to some relatively small detail that they try to make a huge brouhaha over because they have nothing better to say.