alt Hacker NewsThat there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.
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The day I picked up the first iPhone I was carrying a Blackberry, a flip phone and an mp3 player. Really interested to hear what you're thinking of that was an equivalent product.
What were they?
It's not a lie. All you need to do is watch the unveiling.
The most important bit (and reason it's not a lie) is when Jobs demoed scrolling.
"So... here i have all my songs... how do i scroll? I just... take my finger, and swipe".
You can hear the crowd visibly gasp. Every product before was arrow-keypad based and was not designed for touch. Plus it didn't have a desktop level OS, plus the capabilities of a desktop level OS. There was no equivalent.
when the iphone originally came out, this was absolutely true. the way it handled rendering the desktop versions of pages alone, w/ the double-tap-to-zoom put it in its own tier beyond the blackberries / n-gages / etc. contemporaneously extant. beyond that, it was clearly just a better ux on existing tech, i’ll give you that.
I owned those devices. They were really bad, so I think it's fair to say that. There's a reason we kept calling everything else a potential iPhone killer, and forgot them all.