That was an amazing keynote. "An iPod, a Phone, and an Internet Communicator" The thing that changed things the most was actually the internet communicator aspect, getting rid of that awful looking mobile internet and bringing the actual internet onto a phone. Could you imagine if we still had this?
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.
However, even though it was mobile, it was not a phone. There were phones coming up with VGA and above resolution, though.
I was very early on the first iPhone. I think there are two things that people have forgotton:
(1) No stylus. Yes there were other touchscreen phones, and phones that had virtual keyboards, but they all had stylus input. Apple was the first one to do finger touch and have it work.
Finger friendly was well known in the industrial and enterprise fields. Apple's breakthrough was selling it to the mass consumer.
Everyone else had legacy enterprise customers to worry about. Apple had no such albatross about its neck.
(2) Unlimited data plans. Data plans were ridiculously expensive before the iPhone, the iPhone made large amounts of mobile data actually practical for a consumer.
My Verizon smartphone plan at the time was $40 a month, unlimited 3G.
But yes, starting off with a $20 plan (albeit slow EDGE) was brilliant on the part of Apple and AT&T.
(3) Sleek and sexy. All screen, one button.
One physical button was indeed clever, especially the way it hid the all-important reset/recovery functionality of the time. Every time the user clicked the Home button, the system could kill off a wayward process and recover to the homescreen. That was incredibly brilliant, hiding it in plain sight.
It's good to have engineers though. We need someone to construct the ideas, innovation, and visionary sight of those that change the world.
Yes. Like the engineer who showed Jobs flick-scrolling and got him all excited about paying more engineers to do a touch phone
Which reminds me of another lost artifact of the iPhone launch -- remember how important Adobe Flash used to be?
I still find having Flash very handy. One of my favorite local restaurants has a Flash-only menu to get to see its daily specials.
