I had a touchscreen phone that could hold hours of video or hundreds of songs, send instant messages, browse the web, get apps, use WiFi... In 2004. In 2005 you could alreday get GPS, more versatile hardware and better accessories.
The much maligned N-Gage had a true multitasking OS with internet and apps in 2003, except Americans never got along with Nokia or Symbian OS.
They did. Even the article mentions the Palm Treo, then there were the Nokia Communicators, etc. The iPhone was far from being the first smartphone, but it was the first to break the nerd-wall and sell to the masses.
The first iphone was not even a smartphone, it was a featurephone with a fancy UI.
Only with the 3G could they start claiming it was a smartphone.
Sadly didn't stop boneheads like a NYT writer to try to relabel it as a "superphone" because smartphone was apparently by then too pedestrian for something Apple made...
Of course it had apps, just no 3rd party apps. Email, texting, contacts, calendar, and by far the best web browsing experience made the very first iPhone plenty smart. Jobs pretended you didn't need 3rd party apps, everything could be done on the web; of course Apple always intended to allow 3rd party apps.
> mail, texting, contacts, calendar, and by far the best web browsing experience made the very first iPhone plenty smart
Back then pretty much every high end phone had that... The IPhone wasn't anything special at that time. The IPhone really took off then they allowed 3rd party apps.
The whole point of a smartphone are third party apps.
LG had more than a dozen phones with touch screen (resistive) at that time that had "apps" but no third party apps (except for JavaME apps).
The game changer (as the linked site from Apple states as well) was an App Store allowing direct access to third party apps. And that's what created another modern tech revolution.
> The whole point of a smartphone are third party apps.
No. The point of a smartphone is to expand the scope of what can reasonably be done so they it can be considered more like a computer than a dedicated device with a narrow, defined set of capabilities. Jobs was right that the quality of the iPhone's browser was sufficient to raise it to that level.
Of course having 3rd party apps raises it to another level. It would have been a death sentence if the iPhone proceeded for too long without them while competitors developed a robust app ecosystem but that was never the plan.
Cell phones have only existed since the 80's... "smart phones" have existed since the 90s - back in a day when Palm, Nokia, Windows and Blackberry ruled...
10 years ago? As far as cell phones go? Most definitely the "Dark Ages"... Considering we are moving into a time frame when watches are starting to have cell connectivity:
"more pixels" is quite an understatement. From 320x240 and 640x480 to 1920x1080 and beyond (Sony made a 4K phone!).
But from EDGE to LTE, from weak single core processors to 64-bit 4/6/8 core beasts, from no GPU to what would be considered desktop grade back in the day, from shitty 3gp 144p videos to hardware accelerated 4K H.264/5/VP8/9…
Yeah, people still do messages, but messages now include high quality multimedia edited on device.
Also, web surfing rules. Opera Mini on J2ME and others sucked, it was nothing like the modern mobile web.
And here i still find myself preferring OMini set for single column, as it also strips out all the "modals" and JS bloat found on this "modern" web of yours.
As for editing videos or such on a mobile device, bah humbug. The interface is not there in any more than the most rudimentary way. If anything it has regressed unless one happen to have a Galaxy Note, as fingers simply do not offer the precision.
Lots of high-end feature-phones had all these features in 2007–2008. (GPS was not common before then, but some had it earlier.)
> Facetime in realtime to anyone in the world?
Video calling was a heavily promoted feature of the first 3G phones, a long time ago.
> What about doing all of the above at the same time?
Good feature-phones had multitasking in 2006. I would often listen to music while running multiple third-party apps (!) at the same time.
Of course, these phones cost a tiny fraction of the price of the first iPhone, so hardware limitations like having only a few megabytes of RAM were a bit constraining. The functionality was basically there though.
I owned a Moto Razer (original). I've owned a Treo. I've owned multiple iPhones and multiple Samsung Notes.
Even comparing the original iPhone vs the current batches of iPhone - we are talking GENERATIONS of improvements. Massively better camera's, GPU, CPU, Batter, Screens - both pixel counts and size, network infrastructure, software infrastructure (MySpace vs Facebook).
Orders of magnitude improvements across ALL of those metrics.
Simply talking multi-tasking on the original Android and iPhones vs today? Comparing those vs the Palm and Blackberries they replaced?
I've lived through 20 years of Cell Phone... 10 years ago may not have been the "Dark Ages"... but it was the time immediately afterwords (Palm/BB/WinPhone were definitely the Dark Ages).
We are comparing Horses & Buggies, Model Ts and 2018 Honda Civics... the Model T was better than horses and buggies... but not that much better.
