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