[Yoshi 1080]

Originally Posted by nick101

I don't mean to sound rude, but isn't there a bit of wisdom after the event in here?

No, I always believed in the concept behind the iPhone. Possibly because I hated my old phone.

When the iPhone was launched, it was fairly clear that it would be a decent success, for the reasons you've described. But I don't recall it was clear that it would be a game-changer, as it has turned out to be.

To be honest, I thought the iPhone would only rule the high-end smart phone market and leave the lower markets to copycats. I didn't know the iPhone would become that much of a success; however I was sure that it's design paradigm would eventually become so.

No hardware keyboard - fail! No 3G - fail! No copy/paste, MMS, Exchange email - fail!! And how can you expect to succeed with a browser that doesn't even support Flash?

I believe most of those arguments were also made by Steve Ballmer, who ridiculed the iPhone and praised the pseudo advantages of Windows Mobile. Such comments were also made by the former CEO of Palm. Turned out the same.

By the way, I’d argue that the iPhone’s browser was the first really usable mobile browser anyway. I had a Sony smart phone before and neither it's native browser nor Opera Mobile were really comfortable to use. Just thinking of those small scrollbars ... And Flash, please, most phones were restricted to Flash Lite anyway.

We know now that none of that counted for much against the fact that this was the first genuinely usable smartphone and we also know that since then every rival has been judging their own products against the iPhone. Let's face it, Android is pretty much a re-engineered iPhone OS.

But, if we're honest with ourselves, we didn't *know* that would happen 3 years ago.

That's what the so-called media experts said. That's why it scored rather low in many tech magazines. No 3G, no advanced Bluetooth stuff, no MMS, no cam with 1000MP, bla bla bla. Thing is, these are all purely technical specifications. They are nice, but they are not what defines a product.

And that's absolutely what was wrong with the phone industry prior to 2007: the industry was focusing on the technology, not on the user. And that, in turn, was the reason why most people hated their phones. No matter if feature phones or smart phones, their user experiences were mostly mediocre. The iPhone was the first phone that really put the user into focus and that's why it was a revolution. Not because of it's touch screen or usable web browser. After all, most people don't use those advanced technologies anyway. I never saw anyone using UMTS video conferencing and only few who ever exchanged data via Bluetooth. Partly because most people didn't even know how to use those features.

Of course I couldn't have *known* the iPhone would become such a success. But as I said, almost all phones prior to the iPhone were crap (most of them still are), they were technology monsters that were awful to master. So it was only a matter of time until the new concept behind the iPhone, to put the user into focus, would overthrow the market.