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iPhone Was Missing These 10 Essential Features When Unveiled in 2007

some will look at this list and say, people who waited for the 3G were smart.... and those of us early adopters will look at this list and remember the good ole days when these items were introduced one by one. Good times.

You that waited can thank me now :)
 
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Let's not forget how absolutely absurdly expensive the original iPhone was. $500 ($800 now adjusting for inflation) and it required a plan with AT&T. The year afterwards when the iPhone 3G was unveiled, one of the big selling points was the fact it was over half the price of the original


I bring this up in parallel to the Apple Vision Pro. Yeah this thing is absurdly expensive but it's not gonna stay that way forever. By next year they'll probably announce the Apple Vision that will be over half the cost of the Vision Pro, so after all the Vision Pro hype of the early adopters they introduce a more accessible way for the average consumer to be able to join the fun.
 
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Kar98 said:
en.m.wikipedia.org

HTC P4350 - Wikipedia

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

Multitasking copy paste MMS GPS.
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So you mean windows MOBILE. Not windows phone lmao.

Windows MOBILE and windows PHONE and Windows 10 mobile are 3 different things.
Your HTC ran windows Mobile 6...which was extremely dated (and Precisely why apple overtook windows mobile marketshare only 2 years on the market with the iPhone 3Gs).

A Resistive touch screen and heavy reliance on stylus? The app store came to the iphone OG a year after the release, and thus removed most advantages of Windows mobile(windows mobile marketplace was terrible for apps). SO no, a $100 windows mobile phone was not more useful overall than iPhones (or even Android). Heck, not even blackberry. Windows mobile literally was archaic.
 
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james2538 said:
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.
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If i had to guess probably a HTC touch Pro (I had that lol) or Samsung Omnia.
 
I was a vivid Windows Mobile fan, and had a pair of Xperia Windows phones. The second was a disaster.

Then, my first iPhone: the 4. 2010-launch day. The real one. The useful.

From this, only iPhone.
 
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james2538 said:
HTC that was it! Cingular re-branded it as the 8525
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Yep I was an avid Htc fangirl :D the touch pro (and the Diamond) followed by the HD2(which later the design was used for the HD7(for windows phone 7) and HTC EVO(the first 4g Android phone for Sprint) which i also had both of them :p
joloriquelme said:
Xperia Windows phones
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I never used Sonys Windows Phones but I did use their Xperia Android phones. I always did enjoy their designs.
james2538 said:
It's a MacRumors tradition that goes back to the original iPod, just immediately dismissing any new product from Apple.
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I have noticed most of those comments are usually from android users :p
 
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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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I think their hesitancy was that turn by turn GPS just absolutely DEMOLISHED the 3G's battery life. I remember navigating around with Tom Tom via a car mount and even being plugged in the battery would ever so slowly drain.
 
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I remember thinking the original iPhone was going to be a souped-up flip phone with iTunes. How wrong I was.

Hard to believe that even without those features missing, most people were blown away when they first saw the device in person.

Almost 17 years now, that doesn't even seem real. I don't know why, but I tuned in to that keynote in 2007 and probably signed up for MR not long after when I began acquiring tons of Apple gear. For folks like myself, the iPod and iPhone were gateway Apple drugs.
 
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MacRumors said:
Photo Messages: The original iPhone supported text messaging via SMS, but there was no ability to send photos.
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Technically it wasn't that you couldn't send photos, but that you couldn't send them via MMS. You could still send them via email, and that was what Apple was trying to encourage (I believe it was shown in some of the advertising).
 
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Copy and Paste
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Apple got a lot of crap for not including Copy and Paste on the iPhone in 2007

Then Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 7 without Copy and Paste... in 2010

Whoops...

🤣
 
Unity451 said:
true. Not to mention the $30/line/month more that most people were not accustomed to paying.
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That's true.

But that was the cost of having a "smart" phone at the time. Blackberries, Palm, Windows Mobile, etc all required that fee.

Eventually we got to the place where all phones are "smart" phones. And we aren't counting minutes and texts anymore...

:p
 
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In other words: it required half a brain cell to actually use the maps, didn’t suck all your attention with social media or games, didn’t encourage vacuous self promotion and made proper phone calls instead of awkward video ones.

I had the OG iPhone and it was bloody brilliant. We didn’t need half a dozen messaging apps because email did the job for sharing of pretty much anything.

I bought mine outright and had a sweet unlimited data/locally made calls package for £15 a month from O2 in the UK.
 
Nermal said:
Technically it wasn't that you couldn't send photos, but that you couldn't send them via MMS. You could still send them via email, and that was what Apple was trying to encourage (I believe it was shown in some of the advertising).
Click to expand...

They enabled MMS in iOS 3 and it was available on the 3G. They never enabled it with the 2G on the same OS, for some reason.

It was trivial to get MMS on the original iPhone with a jailbreak, however.
 
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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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$499 (4GB) was fairly pricey for the time given that it required a 2 year AT&T contract. The cheapest AT&T iPhone plan (which wasn't unlimited talk and text) back then was $59.99/month. In today's dollars, $499 would be around $740 and $59.99/month would be around $90/month.

You can get new iPhones today for as little as $429 retail without any carrier commitment, and various carrier "deals" can potentially bring down the price of iPhones hundreds of dollars. There are also much cheaper carrier plan options available today.
 
wilhoitm said:
This is History! Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, said the iPhone would fail! Anyone remember the brown Microsoft Zune?

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Ballmer was at least right to "laugh" at the price. As it turned out, the price of the iPhone was notably reduced less than three months after launch and reduced further the following year. The 8GB iPhone went from $599 (with 2 year AT&T contract) to just $199 (with 2 year AT&T contract) in one year.

Ballmer's reaction would’ve likely been a bit different if iPhones had launched at the lower prices.
 
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You gotta remember that the phones that 95% of people used at the time only had the following features:
  1. Making phone calls
  2. Writing very short SMS messages by pressing the number keys repeatedly
  3. Choosing from 9 different ring tones
For most intents and purposes, that was it.
 
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