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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone itself did not bring anything new except a slick interface coupled with multi-touch. We already had powerful smartphones, for example ones running Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

But the iPhone brought smartphones to the public's attention, and the iPhone later brought the App Store.

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The "slick interface" is, I think, the entire genius of the iPhone (especially when compared to its competition). Sure the functions of the iPhone were all (mostly) present in competing devices when it launched, but it was hard(er) to leverage them on Windows Mobile or Blackberry because the interface wasn't nearly as polished and easy to use. (If you doubt that statement, try using a web browser on a 2007-era Blackberry. Even today, with much more of the internet being "mobile aware", the experience is so awful it is almost disingenuous to say that those devices can browse the internet at all).

Simply put, it was very much the "slick interface" that "brought smartphones to the public's attention", and ultimately, illustrated how powerful having a pocket computer really is.

True. But the iPhone was far from the first in its category.

You might say, however, it was the first good device in its category.

It's more important to be good than to be first. Otherwise Microsoft would be the king of tablets right now.

The same thing is true for the iPod.

I had one of these in 1998/1999: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300

The point is that they were not good enough for the task. For example I had several "smartphones" before my iPhone and really browsing the web was so much of a pain that, if you were near a computer, you'd turn it on wait 5 minutes for it to boot and still get your task done quicker than trying with your phone.

In fact going home to check something on computer (or ringing someone up) was often preferable to using an early smartphone.

Windows mobile didn't solve the web problem before the iPhone, several vendors solved the email problem before the iPhone though, which was easier, but just a small part of the problem.

Yeah. Web browsing on Windows Mobile was terrible. Only slightly better than WAP.

Especially with a stylus, /shudder, I don't miss that at all.

To be fair, it isn't quite as bad as browsing on a feature phone with optical trackpad. Styli also have enough precision to avoid zooming in when clicking on links.

On the other hand, it's a dreadful browsing experience in practice.

This is a complete fallacy and ignores everything inside.

The iPhone wasn't just the hardware—though it was very good for what it did, with e.g. Android taking 3 years to match the multi-touch or accelerometer sensor quality even on their flagship phones.

What made the iPhone shine was the software, where they took the mature base and frameworks of OS X and used them to power a phone. While competing smartphones were still running on underpowered embedded kernels, iOS was supremely modern, fully threaded, with full separation between CPU and GPU, needed for that butter smooth response. And on top of that were frameworks for image/media processing, vector/PDF rendering, a mobile GPU-accelerated version of WebKit, etc. All the stuff that powers QuickTime, iTunes, iLife, was all there, and in non-neutered, slightly modernized form.

Thanks to this, Apple could nail both the feature set and performance of their built-in apps, and it opened the door for the app store to explode with innovation. The difference between a good UI and a bad one isn't a skin, it's how responsive everything is and how easy it is to do sophisticated things. It's a camera app that starts up instantly, a photo gallery that can generate and load thumbnails without lag or hitches, a built-in search engine that is fast and language-aware, ...

Most people in the cell phone industry said the same thing five years ago.

But, having used both WM5/6 and Symbian, those phones weren't just less slick, they were nightmares to use compared to what we have today. It really was baby software.

It wasn't for everyone, that much is true. But I liked Windows Mobile on my iPAQ PDA (not a phone), it was fine for me. As a technical user I didn't mind the interface, it was familiar to some extent and had the complexity that I loved about Windows.

I'm sure the professional accountant, likely an abacus user, would likely have derided mechanical calculators when they arrived on scene.

I'm not even going to mention horse carriages vs. automobiles.

> The iPhone itself did not bring anything new except a slick interface coupled with multi-touch.

This is about as useful as saying "the space program brought nothing new except the ability to go to space."

> But the iPhone brought smartphones to the public's attention

Why?

Because the interface worked so much better than anything that came before it.

The market doesn't necessarily give points for trying. You win when you make something people want. People want things that work well. Until the iPhone, smartphones simply didn't.

>This is about as useful as saying "the space program brought nothing new except the ability to go to space."

But the point is that we had already, metaphorically, been to space. We just did it better this time and went to the moon, too.

I think a better metaphor is that we'd already been to space, but this time we let everyone do it, not just astronauts (i.e. the technically inclined)

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