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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

It forced you in a crappy phone provider with unlimited data.

Having a better than average phone browser wasn’t such a big deal, having a browser you could use without thinking about it was huge.

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The browser itself was ground breaking imho. Everything seemed to require a mobile specific browser and those versions of websites looked like garbage.

The iPhone was (as far as I know) the first device that really and truly let you have real websites on your phone (even if it was just a tiny version of it)

I had been waiting for such a device for a long time, and this was the thing that got me over to Apple in any real sense.

There was a wide range of mobile browsers. From what I recall Windows Mobile 5/6 smart phone’s browsers were arguably better than the 1st gen iPhone. Though the phones where overall worse.

Absolutely not. Even without App store iPhone was significantly better than Windows Mobile 5/6.

This is 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile?useskin=vector#...

this is 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile_6.0?useskin=vec...

Devices were much worse compared to even first gen iPhone. Ironically, it only for worse because the industry decided that using their shitty resistive touchscreen with UI even worse than previous models - menus had large buttons, but apps were built for stylus.

I had an HTC TyTN II windows mobile 6 CE mobile phone. Basically same year as original iPhone. IE was rapidly abandoned and unusable. But with Gmail + activesynch it was like a blackberry with instant email. Opera mobile worked as well as modern browsers, probably better than iPhone. 3G. GPS. Load a multitude of apps self contained onto the huge SD card. It was a much more powerful capable device than an iPhone almost even up to today's standards. But it was clunky as hell and setting up the mobile internet was an insanely complicated process. I'm not suprised the iPhone won out.

I agree the devices were worse overall, however IE on Windows Mobile in 07 could render more websites well at the time including Flash support etc.

The browser’s UI was also worse thus the ambiguity.

Oh, I remember what flash on a mobile looked like in 07. In fact, I remember how taxing flash was on PC in 07. I also remember how vulnerable flash was.

Yeah, it could render more, but it was unusable because no one designed for mobile back then. IMO mobile world was sad until Apple came in.

Symbian was quite good, the only thing was the strange Symbian C++ dialect, which wasn't something sorted out by iPhone until the store finally came to be.

Symbian the OS was solid. Symbian the devices were mediocre. iPhone was much more polished and consumer friendly. Touch screen, size, weight, iOS, the browser, data -- it's hard to attributes iPhone's success to a single thing, but the overall package was head and shoulder above anything else.

Yeah, the iPhone was the first phone where it felt like it was actually possible to browse the web on it. The Symbians I had previously didn't feel like usable browsers.

Funny how now the internet is now regressing itself to be "mobile-first" and almost all websites have become "websites that look like garbage". Even on my phone I still often switch to the desktop versions of websites as they're easier to use. Let alone trying to use a mobile website on a desktop.

> having a browser you could use without thinking about it was huge

This right here. People forget things like roaming and data charges. $500+ phone bills were not uncommon for business travelers. Data charges made smartphones almost a non-starter for the average person. Apple broke that logjam.

Hardly in Europe, the contracts with data plans were mostly the same for iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian, Java feature phones, Windows CE/Pocket PC.

Worse even, as while the others had pre paid plans, iPhone required a 2 year contract.

and they weren't crappy everywhere, though admittedly they were extremely bad in Silicon Valley until iPhone opened up to other providers, so they get that reputation among tech enthusiasts from sites like HN that are SV-centric

It was Edge, ie 2.5g. It was very slow everywhere it worked at all. But, as the poster said, internet all the time with a flat rate plan was huge. For me, it really changed how I thought about the internet when I had it always with me with zero cost concerns.

It was 2G. It was crappy everywhere. My dumb phone on Sprint had faster internet speeds

They worked great in NYC.

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