It seems like just yesterday in many ways that Apple released the first iPhone, but it was actually the better part of a decade ago. Even so, it took the better part of that “better part of a decade” for the competition to catch up, as this great video, showing the evolution of smartphones, shows.
First released on June 29th, 2007, the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone by any means, but its clean minimalism, full-front touchscreen display, and ahead-of-its-time featureset immediately blew competitors like the BlackBerry Curve 8300, Motorola Q, Nokia N95, and Samsung BlackJack away.
But as this video from CNET shows, even though there were plenty of competitors on the ground when the iPhone debuted, it took until 2011 until all those competitors even came close to catching up with the original iPhone’s hardware innovations. Even then, BlackBerry was a hold out, taking until – no joke – 2013 to releaxe the BlackBerry Z10, which finally adopted the iPhone’s revolutionary form factor.
With this sort of a lead on its competitors, is anyone surprised the iPhone is unstoppable, accounting for a full 92% of smartphone profits?
Source: CNET
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
14 responses to “It’s nuts how far the original iPhone was ahead of the competition”
What are you talking about? The original iPhone couldn’t even run third party apps, while Pocket PC and Palm were doing it for almost 10 years.
but they perfected it!
Apple made it look prettier and thinner and I use it now because of the quality of the app store and my ties to the iTunes media. But my last Pocket PC could run apps (from multiple app stores – remember Handango and PocketGear?), play video and music, read email, had bluetooth, GPS, a camera and wifi. That was back in 2003, when the iPhone wasn’t even a concept yet. Android and Windows Mobile are all incremental improvements on what Palm, then Microsoft started.
Apple made a great contribution to smartphones with its ecosystem concept, but Apple didn’t invent the smartphone and the technical improvements were merely evolution, not revolution.
The article clearly states, “the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone by any means…” And to cherry pick one thing (third party apps) does not reflect on the OVERALL effect the iPhone had on the industry and its competitors (or lack thereof) …
But the Windows and Palm phones had many of the things that iPhone has now, like playing video and music, reading email, browsing the internet, had bluetooth, GPS, a camera and wifi. I didn’t cherrypick anything and the first iPhone was actually kind of inferior to the latest PocketPC phones of the time. It wasn’t until the app store that Apple started to move ahead.
java browser is not part of a smartphone.
If your think Pocket PC and Palm devices were more advanced than the iPhone, you need to see a doctor about that head injury.
Yes, they were ahead of iPhone at the time. I have owned just about every type of smartphone there has been since 2002 (and before that, PDA’s and connected PDA’s – remember the Palm VII, with that pop up antenna? Yeah, I had one of those too).
Palm Treos, various models of PocketPC, Symbian, and recently, iPhones and Android devices, I’ve owned just about every significant model of PDA and smartphone (30-40 devices over the years). And the fact the original iPhone couldn’t run apps automatically puts it behind every smartphone that could. Especially in gaming, of which iPhone had zero gaming capability, other than a few webOS 2 apps you could play in a browser. I remember playing Tiger Woods on both the Palm and PocketPCs. Imagine taking every app off your phone and just using the iPhone’s built in functions. Unless you are a very basic phone user, you would not have had a happy experience compared to what other devices at the time could offer.
And don’t forget the original’s lack of multitasking (PocketPC could multitask apps). And then, finally, the AT&T only exclusivity was a major hinderance to iPhone being accepted.
Yes, the iPhone looked prettier than eveyone else. But when t came to functionality, iPhone was playing catch up until true apps and multitasking came along
Comparing the feature set of a version 1.0 device to that of a version 10 device is stupid. You fail to acknowledge that Apple added all of these features within two years of the initial launch. You also fail to acknowledge that Apple pushed usability of these features to unprecedented levels, thereby growing the smartphone market by ten fold in just five years. Meanwhile the products that you rave over went utterly extinct.
No, it isn’t stupid. The article says that the original iPhone “was ahead of its competition”. Well, its competition was PocketPCs and Palm at the and they were not ahead. And I clearly stated that iPhone eventually overtook them once the app store and multitasking came to iPhone.
I have an iPhone now because, as of now, its the best in my opinion. But to suggest that the original iPhone came out the door conquering all, is just plain not true. A lot of hype, but iPhone had to bake for a year or two before it could match or beat what was out at the time.
The full frontal screen was the first innovation that put it ahead of the pack. Obviously the iPhone was a game changer then, and is still. Your obstinacy in the face of what EVERYONE has said to you speaks volumes…
Pocket PC was a fucking joke, and continually had problems, such as the major bluetooth virus. So yeah, it looked like shit, acted like shit, but “ooh it had apps”.
Palm was great as hand held, but most of the phones sucked.
“With this sort of a lead on its competitors, is anyone surprised the iPhone is unstoppable, accounting for a full 92% of smartphone profits?”
Yet the remaining 8% of smartphone profits allows Samsung, LG, Huawei, Asus, Lenovo, Karbonn, ZTE etc. to make hundreds of millions or even billions. Which means that – despite persistent rumors otherwise – the competition is just as unstoppable. Individual companies like Motorola and Nokia (and in the future possibly HTC and Blackberry, plus Amazon may stop selling phones) may fall by the wayside but there is way too much money being made for Apple to enjoy the same sort of monopoly with phones and tablets that they had with the iPod. Apple knows this, which is why their current strategy is now to attack Android and Google directly in their public statements and now advertising campaigns.
Huawei is a company to watch in particular. They will ship 100 million phones, almost entirely outside of North America. And Huawei is now Google’s next big partner, replacing Samsung. Google will throw a bone LG’s way to keep them happy by letting them make a 2nd generation Nexus 5, but the REAL next Nexus is coming from Huawei. They will give Huawei access to the North American markets and carriers, and in return Huawei will give Google’s apps (if not their services) access to the Chinese market. That will be a HUGE game changer for both companies. As for Samsung … they are welcome to try to fight back with Tizen. Good luck with that.
The iPhone was, and still Is, light years ahead of the competition.
The most remarkable thing is that, with all the copying of the iPhone, competing devices still haven’t managed to come close to the Apple user experience.
“If it’s not an iPhone, it’s not an iPhone”.