Hacker News Reader

Comment by cesarb | Hacker News Reader

> Windows Mobile phones had apps distributed by wherever, you could go get them on a CD from Bestbuy if you wanted.

This was also the case for Palm smartphones. Since they were an amalgam of a Palm PDA and a cell phone, they kept the app model of Palm PDAs. IIRC, you could even transfer apps from one Palm PDA to another through their infrared port, or through Bluetooth if both were fancy ones.

View on HN

I think a lot of people forget that the iPhone was not the first smart phone. I was downloading apps, checking email, and sending IMs over the AIM network with Verichat on my Treo 650 well before the iPhone was a thing.

The two huge innovations of the iPhone were decent web browsing (I had a Treo, it sucked for the web) and the multitouch screen with corresponding gestures. Nobody else was doing anything like this yet, and I remember this being the thing that blew everyone away at the keynote.

Multi-touch was such an enabler, because it meant you could do an on-screen keyboard properly, which meant you could replace the physical keyboard with more screen.

I remember everyone scoffing at the "lol you can't type on it" dramatically missing this point.

Also the keyboard wasn't.stuck with QWERTY! You could swap keyboards. You could have big numbers when typing phone numbers, and letters when texting. You could type Californian street names correctly! Write math! Etc.

Yeah. By our own metrics, the first iPhone wasn’t even a smartphone because it couldn’t load apps.

Even back then, people were exactly clear on those two things being the true revolution of the iPhone.

+1. I've done the same with SymbianOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com