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iPhone Was Missing These 10 Essential Features When Unveiled in 2007

Joe Rossignol said:
Ok, I solved for both of your comments by simply swapping Siri with 3G in the list. :D
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Many, many thanks! 😍🙏
For that 3G alone, yes, indeed we've taken that 3G for granted. I still remember feeling a bit withered inside when I cannot go faster than my friends' Nokias. But when I got my 3Gs, I've been taking it for granted after just two days and always been until 4G arrived.
 
How about File Management and Control Center? It took Apple about a decade to bring those essential features to the device.
 
zorinlynx said:
I remember when the iPhone 3G came out with GPS support, Apple explicitly banned apps from offering turn by turn directions for driving at first. It took a few months for them to change their minds and allow apps like TomTom into the store. (Google Maps with turn by turn directions wouldn't come until much later)

Apple has always been weird and controlling about the app store. It's one of the reasons I hope they get forced to allow alternate app stores.
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First GPS app I used on my phone was MotionX GPS Drive, I think on my 3G. Used it to move from Illinois from Virginia and was kinda amazed, but still preferred my dedicated TomTom until a few years later.

There was a jailbreak turn-by-turn that hooked into google maps before Apple allowed such apps. It was really janky, but worked.. Sorta.
 
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Features like front camera were not common and it was iPhone that made them so. MMS on the other hand was common and wasn’t made available until iPhone os 3
 
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GeoStructural said:
How about File Management and Control Center? It took Apple about a decade to bring those essential features to the device.
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Control Center I use often but I almost never (and idk anyone who does) use the file management so i would be okay if that disappeaqred.
Kar98 said:
Well back then iPHONE WAS a joke. My $100 Windows phone did everything the iPhone didn’t then, and more.
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Ummmm Windows Phone also was lacking features lmao. I am an avid windows phone fangirl (7, 7.5, 7.8, 8, 8.1 and 10) and i will always defend it. But a $100 windows phone was nowhere capable of an iphone. Windows Phones ALSO lacked things like multitasking and copy and paste at launch.
 
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Kar98 said:
Well back then iPHONE WAS a joke. My $100 Windows phone did everything the iPhone didn’t then, and more.
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Possibly, but how common were they? I never saw a single Windows phone in the wild, but I never really hung around techy types either. Saw a lot of Blackberries, and one guy I worked with carried a Treo phone.
 
Almost immediately after the initial price drop I traded in my Windows Mobile Phone. Can't remember the brand but it had a slide out keyboard that flipped the screen horizontally. With the glitchy WinMo OS it would freeze part way 30% of the time.

I gladly gave up copy/paste, video recording and 3G service to have a smartphone that was incredibly stable and much more sleek. Hah, I do remember attempting to use Google Maps to navigate without GPS. It used cell tower triangulation which was a very rough estimate of where you were and couldn't do turn-by-turn, you had to click next like a digital version of MapQuest. Looking back the photos it took in 2007 were pretty spectacular compared to a lot of other camera phones.

I didn't last long without an App Store though. I think I jailbroke it only a couple months after picking it up. Continued to jailbreak every one until around iPhone 5 when we finally got all the software features I wanted.
 
Can’t fault it not having a “retina” display, since that wasn’t a thing at all yet. All the other features existed on other phones at the OG iPhone’s release.
 
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If I remember correctly, it either launched r almost launched without the YouTube app.
IMG_0606.jpeg
 
I still remember my friends making fun of me back in the day because it didn’t have a stylus and that you couldn’t send mp3s or photos via Bluetooth like it was yesterday 😅 how times have changed.

Actually not everything has finally changed, you still cannot move the app icons anywhere on the screen! Does android have a patent on this or something?
 
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I remember reading the MMQB on the bus to work on Edge and I could barely finish the entire article in that 40 minute bus ride to downtown.
 
Sorinut said:
Possibly, but how common were they? I never saw a single Windows phone in the wild, but I never really hung around techy types. Saw a lot of blackberries, and one guy I worked with carried a Treo phone.
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If you are talking about Windows Mobile devices (Pre- Windows Phone 7) they were the 2nd most popular smartphoens in the early 2000s along side Blackberries.Most touchscreen smartphones WERE windows mobile smartphones (blackberry wasnt touch till 2008 with the crappy Storm).

So they were quite popular and common.

If you are talking about Windows Phone 7 they were ehh in the US....but started picking up traction in European countries.

Windows phone 8/8.1 with the Lumia line definitely made them a bit more ubiquitous and they were even more popular than iPhones in certain regions. The Lumia 520 was outselling iPhones in a number of European Regions.

Microsoft aquired Nokia's hardware and aside from the 640 (which was a fairly popular device) they dropped the ball majorly with all future Lumia releases and WIndows 10 mobile was a disaster and thus the platform died.

In short, they were fairly common for awhile.
 
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contacos said:
I still remember my friends making fun of me back in the day because it didn’t have a stylus and that you couldn’t send mp3s or photos via Bluetooth like it was yesterday 😅 how times have changed
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LOL I remember when we could pinch to zoom and I use to tease my friends for their resistive touch screens lol.

Though it is funny that the stylus did make a resurgence with Android and later the apple pen
 
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scorpio vega said:
If you are talking about Windows Mobile devices (Pre- Windows Phone 7) they were the 2nd most popular smartphoens in the early 2000s along side Blackberries.Most touchscreen smartphones WERE windows mobile smartphones (blackberry wasnt touch till 2008 with the crappy Storm).

So they were quite popular and common.

If you are talking about Windows Phone 7 they were ehh in the US....but started picking up traction in European countries.

Windows phone 8/8.1 with the Lumia line definitely made them a bit more ubiquitous and they were even more popular than iPhones in certain regions. The Lumia 520 was outselling iPhones in a number of European Regions.

Microsoft aquired Nokia's hardware and aside from the 640 (which was a fairly popular device) they dropped the ball majorly with all future Lumia releases and WIndows 10 mobile was a disaster and thus the platform died.

In short, they were fairly common for awhile.
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Not many people I knew had smartphones before the iPhone. I worked for a pro football team for a couple seasons (2006-2007) before starting grad school and traveled with them. One of the players had a Palm Treo, and the coaches carried Blackberries, but everyone else had flip phones, despite the big money going around.

Had my crappy Sony-Ericson flip phone stolen at the Philly airport before heading back after an away game.
 
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Sorinut said:
Not many people I knew had smartphones before the iPhone. I worked for a pro football team for a couple seasons (2005-2007) before starting grad school and traveled with them. One of the players had a Palm Treo, and the coaches carried Blackberries, but everyone else had flip phones.
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Smartphones were not synonymous but those who did have them usually had a Windows Mobile (HTC or Samsung), palm or blackberry like you said.

Us kids/teens (i would have been around 9 in 2005, we were using the trendy phones like the sidekick (with the fancy slide out keyabords) or the cool feature phones with keyboards or the RAZR flip phones.

There were also the walkie-talkie Nextel phones.

iPhones definitely made the smartphone maisntream because it made them seem less like something only business people need and more for EVERYONE.
 
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I saw the webcast and loved it, except that I couldn't imagine watching movies on one of those little things. I went to MacWorld the next day and saw an iPhone play bits from Pixar's "Cars" in a display case. When I saw how much better the screen was than the current state of the art (I had a RAZR at the time), I got it.
 
scorpio vega said:
Control Center I use often but I almost never (and idk anyone who does) use the file management so i would be okay if that disappeaqred.

Ummmm Windows Phone also was lacking features lmao. I am an avid windows phone fangirl (7, 7.5, 7.8, 8, 8.1 and 10) and i will always defend it. But a $100 windows phone was nowhere capable of an iphone. Windows Phones ALSO lacked things like multitasking and copy and paste at launch.
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en.m.wikipedia.org

HTC P4350 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org

Multitasking copy paste MMS GPS.
 
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Unity451 said:
Back when spending $499 on a phone seemed like it was reserved for only the elites.
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That's because a phone is also effectively a computer in modern times. Who would have imagined being able to juggle your finances, film professional grade movies, play 3D games on a phone 24/7 in the past?
 
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