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Comment by nadagast | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.

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Very little of this rings true for me, but that part worst of all.

The mobile web pre-iPhone was terrible. Nobody used it, nobody wanted to use it, and nobody wanted to build it. At best there was a shitty cut back version on the `m` subdomain. WAP/WML were terrible and didn’t give you anything close to the real web, and XHTML Basic was still-born.

The iPhone came along with its “desktop class web browser” and it genuinely worked. Steve Jobs got on stage and told everybody if they wanted to build apps for the iPhone, they should be web apps. Then he told everybody Flash was terrible – which it was – and that we should all use open standards instead.

Practically overnight, everybody commissioning websites wanted them to be “iPhone-compatible”. They did not ask for mobile sites – they specifically asked for them to be iPhone-compatible.

And because WebKit was open-source (thanks to it being based upon KHTML), all the other phone vendors took the code and ran with it, including Android.

This is why I say there is no single organisation that has done more to push the mobile web forward than Apple. The difference in attitudes and capability towards the mobile web changed practically overnight, and it’s directly attributable to Apple’s intentional actions to develop and promote the mobile web.

> Very little of this rings true

How old are you? I'm betting mid-twenties.

What 'real' web are you going to get on a 1.5in phone screen?

What real web are you going to get when there's no 3g, much less a reliable signal on a lot of places.

Wap worked well for actually relaying information.

The original iPhone had a 3.5” screen, Wi-Fi, and EDGE. The iPhone 3G came a year later, with, shockingly, 3G. So yeah, that web browser that actually worked did actually work. Sure, it was slow compared with today’s speeds, but giving people what they want slowly matters far more than giving people what they don’t want marginally faster. Remember most people were on dial-up at home back in those days so the web was hardly fast on desktop either.

WAP might’ve been able to convey information, but so could Lynx in an 80×24 terminal – people want more than that. WAP sites were never popular (aside from some Japanese platform, IIRC) and I don’t think the average web developer had even heard of WAP or WML at the height of their popularity.

There were loads of Symbian/S60 phones with browsers.

2.5g/GPRS was usable enough at the time.

WAP was more 1999, a lot happened between that and the iPhone.

I’m not saying the iPhone was the first phone with a web browser, I’m saying that it was the first phone with a web browser that was good enough for average people to want to use it.

Clients were lining up en masse for iPhone-compatible websites, but none of them ever cared about S60 compatibility.

Symbian phones were also based on WebKit, however it wasn't nearly as usable due to many factors, mostly because it emulated mouse pointer (and you controlled it via the joystick) and didn't provide the pinch-to-zoom fluidity of the iPhone Safari. Also iPhone supported most of the major fonts used on the web, had font smoothing, etc. I've used both Symbian WebKit and Safari on first iPhone, and they aren't even close even though they're based on the same underlying browser tech.

Nobody that was paying for mobile data in 2007 was still using dial-up at home, at least not in the US, and they'd been using broadband at work and at school for at least a few years before that, too

The original iPhone was genuinely terrible. A 2006 Nokia could surf the web on the go and tell you where you are. The iPhone could do neither, since Apple did not include a 3G modem or GPS. It also did not have any apps, and one of the key features highlighted by Steve Jobs was voicemail. The 3G one year later was the first truly usable iPhone.

> and one of the key features highlighted by Steve Jobs was voicemail

Visual voicemail was, and is still a fantastic feature, and phones without it existed for an embarrassingly long time afterwards. I don't remember the last year I had to dial a special number and type in my password, in order to get my voicemail read off to me one at a time in order, but... it was not a small number year.

It was a bad phone, poor battery life, fragile, and relatively poor reception.

That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.

it's 3 products: a widescreen iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. Are you getting it?

> It was a bad phone

It got a bit of traction, I think they did ok.

Out of interest I checked. I live in New Zealand and iPhone revenue is about 60% more than my countries GDP.

That’s the brand not a specific device these days Apple is selling well over 200 million phones a year.

The original iPhone sold 6.1 million units in its lifetime and topped out at the 3rd most popular phone in the US, being dramatically less popular in Europe etc. IE less than 2% of current annual sales.

By comparison just the base model iPhone 15 was the most popular phone globally for 3 quarters excluding the iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 15 Pro which where close. Part of that is just being a way better phone in terms of battery life and being significantly more resistant to water etc.

I seem to recall I had a windows phone at the time, with a full keyboard. I could use OS maps on the thing, and although it didn't have GPS, it could get my rough location by tower.

My mate had an iPhone, and it had an app where you could pretend to drink a pint of beer.

That might prove the novelty of the App Store back then. Also, let’s not forget that its’ screen was better than most other smartphones of its time. It was a rather limited phone, but not bad exactly.

The App Store wasn’t planned on release. Apple was pushing for html5 mobile apps at the time. If people had native apps it was via jailbreak

My Nokia 5800 express could connect to a VPN and run a bridged internet connection over Bluetooth in 2008. I clearly remember using it in Switzerland around 2010 to pay for a tramway using a QR code.

Sure, UI was way worse compared to UIKit but in term of features Symbian phones were light-years beyond the iPhone at least until the iPhone 4.

It was bad if you had a Nokia smartphone, or a Blackberry. Lots of people felt they weren't ready to give up their keyboards.

It's hard to make objective judgment when you're in one tribe's trench.

It got a lot harder to text while driving with the loss of physical keyboards. I used to write messages without needing to take my eyes off the road.

At least now I can leave people long, rambling voice notes with the excuse that I'm behind the wheel!

Another way of looking at it is that it made the "real" web shit.

The mobile-web world before the iPhone was one where mobile devices were second class citizens; desktop "real" websites first, and scaled down versions of those sites second (for mobile devices). The information itself was readily available to both, even if the presentation was lacking on the latter.

Jobs knew the only way to win was to not play the same game, because the open web is an even playing field. If you control a new platform on the other hand, you can't lose. So here we are, with locked down, dumbed down toys determining the standard.

Better internet may be, but that doesn't make an entire phone. There was the terrible battery life, limited multitasking, poor camera, etc.

Fuck, you missed it being bad at being a phone. It launched on the network that had such bad coverage they needed Apple's hottest product ever to get people to switch. They had to put a cell repeater (or was it a miniature tower?) in the presentation center so the call would go smoothly, and still had to rig the cellular icon to always show full bars.

Judged purely as a "Let's give Ted a call"-phone, it was fucking bad compared to the competiton. They killed it in other areas, don't get me wrong, but not at being a phone.

It. Was. Bad. But Apple managed to strongarm telcos and it came with free unlimited 3G.

Strike that, not 3G, 2G and Edge !

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