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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>This needs a dose of cynicism I think. The success of the iPhone in 2007 really wasn't driven by hardware capability (except arguably the capacitative touch screen). Even then, other phones had faster processors, more memory, and equivalent GPUs.

No, they really didn't. Any citation?

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Nokia N95. First available March 2007, three months before the iPhone was introduced.

  * Memory - 160MB, versus iPhone: 128MB.
  * CPU - Dual CPU, 332 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 2420 (ARM11-based), versus
 Samsung 32-bit RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.0 412 MHz
  * Display - iPhone: 320x480 18-bit 3.5", versus N95: 240x320 24-bit, 2.6"
  * Network ability: HSDPA 3.5G, versus iPhone: GSM/EDGE
  * Camera: 5MP, versus iPhone 2MP

Much as the iPhone was lauded - one of the criticisms leveled at the iPhone was that the hardware was quite underwhelming. My specs were lifted from the respective Wikipedia pages, but this is hardly a subjective or minority opinion.

My impression is that other 2007 phones were wasting their hardware on 1990s style UIs because their OSes were designed for <100 MHz processors. The iPhone actually used its performance.

The Nokia N95 was a top of the line phone, released a couple months earlier. "Other phones", as in 95% of them, didn't have those specs.

And even then, the specs didn't make much difference. It was just another phone, bulky, with a small, dark screen, clunky buttons and a shitty interface: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HwT...

"The Nokia N95 was a top of the line phone"

Whereas, of course, the iPhone was brought out as a budget, bottom line phone, marketed at low end consumers, given away by carriers...

Only in the RDF could a phone that was 15g lighter (120 vs 135), and smaller (99x53x21mm vs 115x61x12) be described as "bulky".

Of course, "bulky" will be redefined shortly to mean "less deep, which as everyone knows, is the only metric that matters" - just like the iPhone's aspect ratio was perfect - until the iPhone 5 came out, of course.

>Whereas, of course, the iPhone was brought out as a budget, bottom line phone, marketed at low end consumers, given away by carriers...

Whereas, of course, the Nokia was 40% more expensive -- at $699.

Not to mention that, hw specs aside, it was so last decade, and the inefficient BS OS it had, made it dog slow, unintuitive and unfit for the intertubes.

>Of course, "bulky" will be redefined shortly to mean "less deep, which as everyone knows, is the only metric that matters" - just like the iPhone's aspect ratio was perfect - until the iPhone 5 came out, of course.

Err, what? Bulk is about volume. Unless you have 2D pockets, the Nokia being smaller in the other 2 dimensions doesn't mean shit. Just look at the thing in the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HwT...

Also look at the UI. Is this supposed to be a joke?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GmLchZN1Dc

So, yes, it had a better camera (since Nokia mostly slapped on a huge-ass compact camera lens on it), and it had 3G (since Nokia could not care less about battery life with 3G on).

heh. slow down turbo. nobody's arguing that the execution on the iphone wasn't completely awesome.

that being said, i find it funny that you flippantly discard the number of phones with better specs in one breath, and then acknowledge them in the next. (despite them having shitty implementations)

i am totally entertained picturing you as a slavering apple fanboy raging at a hacker news thread. makes me giggle.

m3mnoch.

p.s. btw, using your number and a gsma.com estimated 500 new phone models per year, 5% of them that "have those specs" amounts to 25 phone models that had better specs than the iphone. just sayin'.

So, on par or nearly on par specs on most counts (except, of course, 3G) but vastly superior specs on some counts? People criticised the first iPhone for its lack of 3G. That much is true.

But its horse power? That would have been an exoteric opinion at the time. Legend has it that Nokia was so astonished by the iPhone, they got their high speed cameras out to see whether the phone was really doing 60fps scrolling.

The first iPhone was a towering technical achievement (except for the lack of 3G). It was a phone that made all the right compromises at exactly the right time.

I think you would have been hard pressed to find anyone disputing that in 2007. Sure, people doubted whether it would really be useful without the ability to install third party apps, people doubted whether Edge would be enough, people bemoaned missing features – all good reasons to not want the original iPhone – but the technology was without a doubt great.

And all you are engaging in is revisionist history.

(I’m writing this doubting that iOS7 will be any of that. It’s a train-wreck on the iPad currently. Yeah, it’s just a preview but an OS is so complex, I don’t see how it’s possible to turn this mess into a coherent whole in the few months they have left. No matter how many hours they pour into it. I’m pessimistic.)

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