An Inside Look at Google's Reaction to the Original iPhone Introduction

[mKTank]

Define winning. Last time I checked, iOS is the most widely used mobile platform in the world.

Not that marketshare matters, but no.

http://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_mobiosxtime.htm
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24257413
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57610229-94/android-snags-record-81-percent-of-smartphone-market/

Not even close.

And before the "but iPad!" replies come along: http://www.zdnet.com/idc-data-shows-android-also-rules-the-tablet-market-7000023899/

But again, anybody who says one platform wins over the other simply based on market share really doesn't know what they're talking about. More people buying something doesn't mean anything.

 

[iSayuSay]

Define winning. Last time I checked, iOS is the most widely used mobile platform in the world.

Uummm ... No...

 

[Max(IT)]

I think the victory is more about actual features, design, practicality, etc. Android pretty firmly surpassed Apple on all those fronts recently, especially after Ice Cream Sandwich.

Market share means nothing and most Android users, despite a vocal minority, couldn't care less how many other people use Android.

Design ? Practicality ?
I still think iOS is way ahead of android in those aspects ....

All is subjective .... In this thread I read about people happy of his note 3.
In my opinion the note 3 is an ugly device I don't want in my pocket (pocket ??? Well ... Backpack).
I see a lot of android users celebrating iPhone funeral when iPhone still is the most desired smartphone out there.

----------

Not that marketshare matters, but no.

http://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_mobiosxtime.htm
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24257413
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57610229-94/android-snags-record-81-percent-of-smartphone-market/

Not even close.

And before the "but iPad!" replies come along: http://www.zdnet.com/idc-data-shows-android-also-rules-the-tablet-market-7000023899/

But again, anybody who says one platform wins over the other simply based on market share really doesn't know what they're talking about. More people buying something doesn't mean anything.

I say again: speaking about iPhone vs android is meaningless ...
Is like speaking about iPhone vs electronic devices ...

Would you like to speak about iPhone 5s sales vs Samesung galaxy S4 ? Or LG G2 ? Or HTC one ?


Btw you linked analysis based on October market data, when the iPhone 5s was just released an not widely available. We all know that unlike Samsung that flood the market with tons of crappy devices, apple release smartphones once a year, so approaching the end of its life cycle every iPhone experiences a slightly decrease in sales (but it sells nonetheless).

 

[Digital Skunk]

I agree, Newton was a far superior product versus Palm.

Actually, they were both a flop at first. The Newton didn't catch on until it licensed Graffiti from Palm so that it could actually be somewhat useful.

In the end, Apple still killed it. Palm was extremely relevant and successful until the Apple dropped the axe of the iPhone on everyone's neck.

Google Now is a magical thing. I got an Email from Amazon saying that my order shipped and Google Now automatically (without me ever opening a UPS link or even copying the tracking number) added a card with live tracking info. When it was delivered, it said "Done with this?" and I just swiped it away. It also automatically gives cards based on your browsing history of updates from sites. I get cards from MacRumors News posts and other sites. It's amazing to have such a nice way to summarize what's going on around you and your habits, and Apple has nothing of that sort.

Google Now is by far the best example of how Apple doesn't get it when it comes to cloud services, and information at a glance. I never had to hit five or six buttons on my Android phones just to get the weather . . . two max . . . but Google now has pretty much made it so that I can get the weather, traffic, my agenda, etc. all with one button press and a swipe.

But again, anybody who says one platform wins over the other simply based on market share really doesn't know what they're talking about. More people buying something doesn't mean anything.

Agreed, but folks will still mention it because it makes them feel good. Like that chap that criticized the Note 3. It isn't good enough to just mention they don't like something, they have to call it crappy and make sly remarks about it. Don't even have facts to back it up and when confronted with facts to the contrary, they will always default back to who sells more.

 

[Max(IT)]

Actually, there were some pretty good browsers before the iPhone. Opera comes to mind.

I also liked the web browser / doc viewer called Picsel, which was unique in that it could display HTML, PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint... the pages showed up in miniature on a lower carousel for quick navigation.

Picsel also had a visual page history, panning with kinetic scrolling, and even a double-tap gesture to zoom.

The browsers were coming along pretty well, but they usually didn't have enough screen real estate. The iPhone browser was greatly helped by having a larger than usual screen at the time.

Heck, my favorite mobile browser for a long time was IE 4 on a Jornada 720 back around the turn of the century. That's full IE on a 640x240 screen. REALLY nice web browsing because on the less wide web pages of that time, you rarely had to scroll sideways... just vertically.

View attachment 452594

However, even though it was mobile, it was not a phone. There were phones coming up with VGA and above resolution, though.

Listen, are you really defending the jornada ???
As an enthusiastic user I was involved in windows CE first approach to the market since 1.0, with Casio E10

Then the more powerful e125

passing through Jornada 720 and a crowd of Compaq iPaq

Before the approach at the smartphone reign with HTC Tytan

And I don't know how many I just forgot.

Well, I had a real passion for those devices but they where powered by a ridiculous operative system. iPhone changed everything ....

 

[kdarling]

Listen, are you really defending the jornada ???
...

Heck yeah It was in a different class than the PDA models your pictures show.

I'm talking about the clamshell version running Handheld PC 2000, which was Windows CE not Windows Mobile. Kept it in my inside jacket pocket.

I had a CDPD wireless modem in it, giving it 19 Kbps wireless capability. High tech in 2001.

Being Windows CE, it had a desktop with taskbar and full IE 4.0, not the crippled Pocket IE of Windows Mobile. (Microsoft's dumbest move ever.) Surfing the web on it was much better than anything else for a long time, as websites of the time were IE 4 and 640 wide compatible. There was no need for constant zooming and horizontal scrolling.

By the time the iPhone came out, we were using IE6 on WinCE 5, which was a powerful combination. Of course, the thought at the time was that everything had to be ruggedized and customized, so our tablets and handhelds were pretty expensive and not known at all in the consumer realm.

(We'd been doing HTML based mobile touch friendly apps since the mid 1990s, and bought a lot of custom gear, so we had good contacts with various manufacturers. I once asked Symbol for a CDMA version of one of their handhelds, and they made me a one-off model within a month. Actually, I think I still have that in a drawer. Oops! Anyway, we were not surprised by the iPhone UI. It was not that much different from what we'd been doing. Once you decide to support fingers, a lot becomes pretty obvious.)

 

[icolove]

Well I'm interested in knowing what benefit to Android this number is giving them that amounts to "winning" over iOS. Please enlighten me. Otherwise it really is useless. If Android was to iOS like Windows is to OSX then he would have a point.

It's so forum trolls such as yourself have ridiculous nonsense to squabble about.

----------

The 2 Android phones used in my household by my daughter and my wife started off great, but gradually began exhibiting bizarre behavior like spontaneous rebooting, sudden power drains, crashing apps, lock-ups, etc. My wife switched to an iPhone two years ago and has been absolutely thrilled with it since. My daughter still has a few months to go but she can't wait to get out Android jail. Her Android phone is so screwy at this point that she more or less uses it for texting and nothing else. And she has to keep the screen to its lowest brightness to minimize the insane battery drain.

So, good for you. You've managed to own an Android phone that doesn't suck. Wish we'd been that lucky. Regardless, those Android phones did accomplish something: they created two new Apple die-hards in my house. I'm not griping.

We had 5 iPhone's.... 4s and 5... all of them failed in one way or another over a span of 7 months. Home buttons stopped responding, wifi wouldn't work on one, the volume buttons on another failed. The other 2 wouldn't turn on. We've moved our business to Samsung phones (S4 & Note 3), hopefully they fair better.

Perhaps we live in a vortex of iPhone destroying microwaves, but they proved, just like the iMac's in the office to be just another bunch of unreliable, disposable, consumer electronics. Most iPhone users never experience that, as they update their phones every year. That's not something we want to do, it's bad for business.

People will always have difference experiences with products. Every car model ever made is the "worst thing ever" or the "greatest ever", it just depends who you ask.

 

[Max(IT)]

Samsung phones more reliable than iPhone ? Yeah a good joke

 

[kdarling]

Hm, I suppose it's not any specific technology that made the iPhone stand out, but how all of it was put together... highly responsive touch screen, high-quality display, intuitive well-designed smooth UI, decent battery life, highly portable, reasonable price (not on day one, but they got there), beautiful design, top-notch music store, wide array of apps (starting in the second year), and a few things I probably forgot.

Your list brings to mind some of the things that Apple chose to do:

• No swappable battery.
• No protective screen ridge.
• Capacitive screen that didn't play well with cold weather or handwriting.
• No cursor pad for easiest one-handed usage (altho that may come back).
• Special cord instead of USB.
• Almost no customization.
• Requirement to have an iTunes account.
• Requirement for a host computer to activate.
• Later, only able to use apps from the company store that took 30%.

It's not that these things weren't known, it's that it defied common sense that people would accept them. lol In some ways, I think only a Steve Jobs could convince people it was okay. And of course, if Microsoft had required the last three items, there would've been an anti-trust investigation

Yes, all the pieces were there, in one form or another, before Apple. Yet, it wasn't obvious how to put them together until Apple did it.

Mild disagreement. I think it was just one way of how to put things together, and because Apple did it a certain way, that became popular. It's certainly not always the best way.

Everything is relative, and a lot depends on chance encounters. Things could've easily gone quite differently. If Jobs had gone ahead with the original idea of a clickwheel based phone, for example, then everyone here would be heatedly debating which clickwheel UI was best



(sorry - making fun of all those before-after shots people use)

Remember, the king of the hill the day before the iPhone was unveiled was Blackberry, which is now considered a veritable joke in comparison. I think if, the day before it was unveiled, Apple had just killed it, we'd all still be using smart phones, but most (whether Blackberry, Android, or Windows-based) would have half-screens, qwerty thumboards, and scroll wheels.

I've already pointed out that this was not the case in 2006, especially worldwide where Symbian (67%) dominated. Next came Windows Mobile (14%), then Blackberry, Linux and Palm (7%,6%,5%).

While physical keyboards were a fad at the time, the market prediction was that touchscreens would become quite popular in the next few years. For one of many examples:

"Touch-screen technology for mobile phones is generating considerable interest from consumers, and it is starting to grow significantly. By the end of 2007, momentum will be very strong for the technology, and by 2012, 40 percent of all mobile phones will likely utilize touch-screen technology." - TechNewsWorld, July 2006

The time was ripe. All throughout 2006, concept all-touch phones were being shown everywhere. Capacitive and multi-touch were hot topics, the former because of Synaptics and the latter because of Jeff Han's TED demo.



Jobs knew he might not be first, and that's why he very unusually outed a barely working device from secrecy six months before it went on sale. As it turned out, he need not have worried, as everyone else was still moving ahead much more slowly so as not to disrupt their current customers.

 

[nebo1ss]

Your list brings to mind some of the things that Apple chose to do:

• No swappable battery.
• No protective screen ridge.
• Capacitive screen that didn't play well with cold weather or handwriting.
• No cursor pad for easiest one-handed usage (altho that may come back).
• Special cord instead of USB.
• Almost no customization.
• Requirement to have an iTunes account.
• Requirement for a host computer to activate.
• Later, only able to use apps from the company store that took 30%.

It's not that these things weren't known, it's that it defied common sense that people would accept them. lol In some ways, I think only a Steve Jobs could convince people it was okay. And of course, if Microsoft had required the last three items, there would've been an anti-trust investigation



Mild disagreement. I think it was just one way of how to put things together, and because Apple did it a certain way, that became popular. It's certainly not always the best way.

Everything is relative, and a lot depends on chance encounters. Things could've easily gone quite differently. If Jobs had gone ahead with the original idea of a clickwheel based phone, for example, then everyone here would be heatedly debating which clickwheel UI was best

View attachment 452692

(sorry - making fun of all those before-after shots people use)



I've already pointed out that this was not the case in 2006, especially worldwide where Symbian (67%) dominated. Next came Windows Mobile (14%), then Blackberry, Linux and Palm (7%,6%,5%).

While physical keyboards were a fad at the time, the market prediction was that touchscreens would become quite popular in the next few years. For one of many examples:



The time was ripe. All throughout 2006, concept all-touch phones were being shown everywhere. Capacitive and multi-touch were hot topics, the former because of Synaptics and the latter because of Jeff Han's TED demo.

View attachment 452690

Jobs knew he might not be first, and that's why he very unusually outed a barely working device from secrecy six months before it went on sale. As it turned out, he need not have worried, as everyone else was still moving ahead much more slowly so as not to disrupt their current customers.

You are attempting to inject a Dose of reality on MacRumors. That will never work with the kids on here who have no concept of what came before or how the evolution of the Technology really worked.

 

[iSee]

You pretty much got it. Apple isn't a company that invents new technologies. They'll develop a few here and there, but they crib parts and ideas from everywhere, just like everyone else.

What Apple does is take things that have been done elsewhere, and make them more elegant and easy to use. They're an ergonomics and design company, in other words. Something I'm sure everyone from Tim Cook, to Jony Ives, to the post guy down in the basement will admit to.

I agree with your first sentence!

My point is that they often don't do it "just like everyone else" except to the point that now other companies are trying to do it like Apple.

To reduce them to a design and ergonomics company is far too simplistic. Of course they pull together existing technologies. But these aren't Lego bricks. It takes real cutting edge R&D and production to turn these parts into products people want to use. Putting it another way: Where are all the devices from all the other design and ergonomics companies? (Not to mention Apple just developed and released the most advanced mobile SoC. How does a ergonomics and design company compete with Intel and Qualcomm?)

 

[mKTank]

Design ? Practicality ?
I still think iOS is way ahead of android in those aspects ....

All is subjective .... In this thread I read about people happy of his note 3.
In my opinion the note 3 is an ugly device I don't want in my pocket (pocket ??? Well ... Backpack).
I see a lot of android users celebrating iPhone funeral when iPhone still is the most desired smartphone out there.

----------



I say again: speaking about iPhone vs android is meaningless ...
Is like speaking about iPhone vs electronic devices ...

Would you like to speak about iPhone 5s sales vs Samesung galaxy S4 ? Or LG G2 ? Or HTC one ?


Btw you linked analysis based on October market data, when the iPhone 5s was just released an not widely available. We all know that unlike Samsung that flood the market with tons of crappy devices, apple release smartphones once a year, so approaching the end of its life cycle every iPhone experiences a slightly decrease in sales (but it sells nonetheless).

I really won't have a discussion with somebody so closed minded who will keep reiterating outdated views on how Apple is the only good phone manufacturer out there and how Samsung doesn't make good phones. Things have indeed changed and practically Samsung's entire current lineup is made up of very impressive phones with many many features that iPhone never had. And no, they're not all gimmicks either.

But again, I have no desire to argue if it's going to be against such blatantly wrong and outdated opinions.

 

[Smartass]

Android did copy iOS, but the funny part is that it became much better.

 

[Max(IT)]

I really won't have a discussion with somebody so closed minded who will keep reiterating outdated views on how Apple is the only good phone manufacturer out there and how Samsung doesn't make good phones. Things have indeed changed and practically Samsung's entire current lineup is made up of very impressive phones with many many features that iPhone never had. And no, they're not all gimmicks either.

But again, I have no desire to argue if it's going to be against such blatantly wrong and outdated opinions.

Outdated ? Dude I have two Samsung smartphones in my home, an S3 and an S4 .... Actually I have a third I don't use anymore ( Galaxy Ace 2) and I'm keeping as a backup for my wife's or my son's Galaxy.

Things are changed but Samsung still lags behind .... Now I'm waiting for the next Galaxy 64739 with a 7" display and a 128-bit eight core CPU ("Did apple went for a 64-bit architecture ? Damn we must build something bigger !" typically Samsung philosophy ....).
Apple isn't the only good manufacturer: Nokia was my favorite several years ago. Now they are doing well again, with a decent os improving at every release.

 

[mKTank]

Agreed, but folks will still mention it because it makes them feel good. Like that chap that criticized the Note 3. It isn't good enough to just mention they don't like something, they have to call it crappy and make sly remarks about it. Don't even have facts to back it up and when confronted with facts to the contrary, they will always default back to who sells more.

Yep, exactly that! People still want to believe it's a black and white world and there can only be one winner. It may have been true for 2007, but Android phones have more than caught up with Apple. There's a lot of competition out there and it's a market filled to the brim with brilliant devices that I just don't have the patience I used to have to argue with somebody who's literally going to dismiss an entire brand of utterly brilliant phones. Same goes both ways of course to the people that dismiss iPhone. Those kinds of people absolutely cannot be considered tech lovers any more if they're so quick to dismiss something simply because it's competition. I've had 6 phones in the past 3 months ranging from iPhone to Android to Windows phone to iPhone to Android etc. That's what being a tech lover is all about. Making sweeping statements about an entire ecosystem of phones from an armchair just because it happens to compete with your phone's manufacturer is frankly outdated, unfair, and I'm not going to take part in it, having actually tried all of these phones and recognizing unmistakable brilliance in every single one.

 

[Troneas]

Now we know the truth.
Android did copy the iPhone.
Enough said.

you should take a look at this video before posting something so naive:


http://www.imore.com/everything-remix-takes-iphone

 

[Max(IT)]

Yep, exactly that! People still want to believe it's a black and white world and there can only be one winner. It may have been true for 2007, but Android phones have more than caught up with Apple. There's a lot of competition out there and it's a market filled to the brim with brilliant devices that I just don't have the patience I used to have to argue with somebody who's literally going to dismiss an entire brand of utterly brilliant phones. Same goes both ways of course to the people that dismiss iPhone. Those kinds of people absolutely cannot be considered tech lovers any more if they're so quick to dismiss something simply because it's competition. I've had 6 phones in the past 3 months ranging from iPhone to Android to Windows phone to iPhone to Android etc. That's what being a tech lover is all about. Making sweeping statements about an entire ecosystem of phones from an armchair just because it happens to compete with your phone's manufacturer is frankly outdated, unfair, and I'm not going to take part in it, having actually tried all of these phones and recognizing unmistakable brilliance in every single one.

Dude I don't know how old are you, but I'm old enough to have followed smartphone market since its beginning.
I am entitled to be called "tech lovers" and I'm spending a lot of money on it.
In this exact moment in my home I have a Nokia Lumia 620 (wp8), two Samsung galaxy (s3 and s4 as I said before), an iPhone 5, an iPad and a Lenovo 7" android tablet ....
I love to give things a try before speaking.
And it costs money, but is my passion ....

I went through all the smartphone market, since first Nokia s60 phone, and tried also the Bada fiasco (Samsung Wave ... Samsung once again).
If I speak about Samsung is because I gave them a lot of money for crappy phones unsupported after 1 year at best .... Not to speak about their "wonderful" after sale support ...
Android ? I think I'm entitled to speak about it, since I had 5-6 android phones in my life, starting from 1.5 until the last Samsung galaxy S4 (I still don't want to consider that monstrous note 3 a smartphone, I'm sorry, I need to carry it around ). Acer ... Sony ... HTC ... Samsung.
The only Android phone I'd like to give a try is the nexus 5 with KitKat vanilla android, just to see if it is better. But I'm not so positive: android will ever be fragmented and inconsistent giving the number of totally different units they are supposed to support ...

 

[iSee]

Your list brings to mind some of the things that Apple chose to do:

• No swappable battery.
• No protective screen ridge.
• Capacitive screen that didn't play well with cold weather or handwriting.
• No cursor pad for easiest one-handed usage (altho that may come back).
• Special cord instead of USB.
• Almost no customization.
• Requirement to have an iTunes account.
• Requirement for a host computer to activate.
• Later, only able to use apps from the company store that took 30%.

It's not that these things weren't known, it's that it defied common sense that people would accept them. lol In some ways, I think only a Steve Jobs could convince people it was okay. And of course, if Microsoft had required the last three items, there would've been an anti-trust investigation

Trading off niche use-cases for an improvements in the primary ones... who could have guessed that would work?!? Yet as far as I can tell, few companies actually work this way. Instead they seem to look around at what's working for another company and go from there. They might try to do it cheaper, or bump some specs or simply count on their distribution channels to make them competitive.

Mild disagreement. I think it was just one way of how to put things together, and because Apple did it a certain way, that became popular. It's certainly not always the best way.

I didn't mean to say it was the best way it could have been done. More like, "significantly better than anyone else had done it to that point." Maybe you still disagree, just clarifying.

I've already pointed out that this was not the case in 2006, especially worldwide where Symbian (67%) dominated. Next came Windows Mobile (14%), then Blackberry, Linux and Palm (7%,6%,5%).

Well, a semantic difference, so hardly worth debating. I wasn't referring to market share. First, I can't put Symbian in the same category. Regarding the rest, people wanted, loved, and used their Crackberries. Blackberry's growth chart was pointing very steeply up; Palm's steeply down; Windows was a default that people ended up with who didn't know any better.

While physical keyboards were a fad at the time, the market prediction was that touchscreens would become quite popular in the next few years. For one of many examples:



The time was ripe. All throughout 2006, concept all-touch phones were being shown everywhere. Capacitive and multi-touch were hot topics, the former because of Synaptics and the latter because of Jeff Han's TED demo.

View attachment 452690

Jobs knew he might not be first, and that's why he very unusually outed a barely working device from secrecy six months before it went on sale. As it turned out, he need not have worried, as everyone else was still moving ahead much more slowly so as not to disrupt their current customers.

Well, it's hard to debate these what-ifs. We can only guess what would have happened with touch-based mobile devices without Apple leading the way.
Since its an intuitive concept and the economics of it were becoming favorable, I think it's a good bet that touch would have come to mobile devices with or without Apple. But if another leader didn't emerge for everyone else to follow, I think it would have been fragmented for quite a while. Stylus vs. finger, 1/2 screen touch + thumboard vs. all-screen touch (vs. touch-screen + scroll wheel, etc.) Perhaps the mobile computing industry would have found a path as good as the one Apple blazed, or even a better one. But I doubt it. (BTW, not just talking about device interfaces here, but the whole package.)

 

[melendezest]

All this arguing about Android vs iOS and who did what first is pointless.

The article points it out clearly: Google (!) reaction to the iPhone's introduction was akin to taking a left hook by Mike Tyson to the chin.

The rest of the industry reacted the same way. To not give Apple credit for this is to just be a hater for hating's sake.

Personal preference is just that. Hell, I'm starting to move away from Apple after 12 years of hardcore fanaticism because I don't like the choices they're making now with their products.

But people here need to quit trying to justify their bias. The iPhone was a shocking, revolutionary device. And it was Apple who put all the "pieces" together in the way they did to make the revolution happen.

Steve Jobs really was brilliant, and the entire computing industry owes a very, very large piece of its greatness to that one guy.

 

[mKTank]

All this arguing about Android vs iOS and who did what first is pointless.

The article points it out clearly: Google (!) reaction to the iPhone's introduction was akin to taking a left hook by Mike Tyson to the chin.

The rest of the industry reacted the same way. To not give Apple credit for this is to just be a hater for hating's sake.

Personal preference is just that. Hell, I'm starting to move away from Apple after 12 years of hardcore fanaticism because I don't like the choices they're making now with their products.

But people here need to quit trying to justify their bias. The iPhone was a shocking, revolutionary device. And it was Apple who put all the "pieces" together in the way they did to make the revolution happen.

Steve Jobs really was brilliant, and the entire computing industry owes a very, very large piece of its greatness to that one guy.

Indeed. Even though iPhone may not be the best anymore, it was responsible for introducing the smartphone as we know it.

 

[7enderbender]

Coming up with something new isn't in Google's DNA. I mean, Google's products are fantastic, don't get me wrong. But I cannot think of a single thing that Google has done that actually felt original. Everything they do (search, maps, email, etc.) starts off as someone else's idea or product.

BTW, don't mistake this for talking trash about Google. That's just what they do, and they're really good at it. I'm just puzzled why anyone would have expected Google to suddenly become very innovative in their pursuit of a mobile OS. They just don't work that way.

No, I agree. And I don't even find their products to be fantastic really. Sure, they revolutionized the search engine. Everything else? Meh. I mean to it starts with simple things like gmail. I use it as a data dump and backup. Otherwise I find it clumsy and convoluted. They're at least as inflexible as Apple when it comes to letting users making choices. I don't like they're collapsed emails for instance. That doesn't work for me, my work and my way of thinking. I need things in strict chronological order and not mashed together by some algorithm (that often enough is wrong) just to give one example. As much as I'm not really in love with my iPhone for a number of (similar) reasons I could not see working with one of those gigantic Android phones.

What I meant was more geared towards hardware. Everyone just caved and went touchscreen everything. I still would like to have a keyboard, a smaller screen and a smaller phone but with modern features otherwise.

 

[shokk]

Just goes to show that Google was only interested in more of the same old junk handsets before they saw the iPhone.

 

[CFreymarc]

Yes, even now as an Android user, I am still wowed by what Apple introduced. It was what even most ultra-geeks wanted in a device. One to rule them all.

At the time it connected and made simple so much technology that it was indeed magical.

It was like Palm OS done Apple style with none of the archaic UI elements that made you want to cry.

Nowadays however . . . . . . . . . . .

You want a really good story. Dig in on the reactions of those working at Palm in the then Miltpitas engineer facility. There were engineers and product managers screaming at their monitors as they watched features demoed on the iPhone launch that was purposed over a year ago and never implemented.

 

[Tankmaze]

you should take a look at this video before posting something so naive:


http://www.imore.com/everything-remix-takes-iphone

Lol, who's naive now? The video acknowledge Apple's achievement and says they made multi touch and touchscreen phones to mainstream, Apple copied stuff from the real world and brought to smartphones. we are talking in the early days here, regarding ios vs android its iPhoneOS 1.0 vs Android 1.0, that Android blantantly copy iPhone concept.

I wont deny iOS 7 got influenced by other smartphones OS, but Apple showed Android how its supposed to be and they take off with it.

 

[Klae17]

Well, I've read some stuff.

How about we start a thread (or required class) for all MacRumors to read before they can post on the site? Oh wait, it would go in the way of the iTunes terms and conditions.