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iPhone Was Missing These 10 Essential Features When Unveiled in 2007

baryon said:
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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And now your iPhone can do all this!

Your iPhone replaces the roomful of equipment found in this 1991 Radio Shack ad

iPhones are expensive, even with the subsidies your mobile carrier provides. But if you add up all the tools you now carry around in your pocket instead of having to toss in your backpack while you travel, the savings are pretty remarkable. A recent post from the Buffalo, NY blog Trending...
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com

iphone-replaces.jpg


:p
 
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The lack of GPS and turn-by-turn navigation kept me from getting the iPhone until the 3GS, since it needed to replace all the features of my existing phone, a Nokia 6110 Navigator.
 
goobot said:
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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Idk, I had some Nokia Music xpress and even that had an App Store and front facing camera.
Nokia-5320-XpressMusic-998.jpg

Can't believe I used it till 2010-2012 and even surfed the web and used Messenger apps and MySpace on it… And officially I used it till 2017, for calling and texting only for my other SIM card. I wanted this phone so bad because everyone had a phone with front facing camera though. Back then I didn't even know what the iPhone was. 2012 was the year I started seeing everyone using smartphones in general…

I do not miss those times, phone wise. Everyone I knew had an Android phone.
 
I remember when Steve said that size was the perfect size and people for years defended that. Good times, always thought the screen should have been bigger and I owned the original iPhone too
 
james2538 said:
Don't even have to leave this forum. There's posts claiming it wasn't a big deal here.

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 wayback archived the announcement reaction thread in case people go back and change their words for this exact reason. :p
 
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erikkfi said:
It did have those nice Aqua-style icons, though, which we in the glorious future have been without for over a decade.
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Exactly. Under Tim Cook's so-called "leadership," instead of leading, he followed Microsoft by copying flat design, which was first introduced on the Zune/Windows 8/Windows Phone.

Under Steve Jobs's true leadership, Apple pioneered skeuomorphic design, which led to OS X's Aqua and the gorgeous iOS under Scott Forstall.
 
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MacRumors said:
Below, we've put together a list of 10 hardware and software features that the original iPhone didn't have when it was introduced in January 2007.
Click to expand...
Notice how every single one of those 10 essential features on that list was introduced while Steve Jobs was CEO. Don't give that mediocre beancounter MBA suit Tim Cook any credit for any of those.
 
I believe the original iPhone and iPhone OS 1.0 allowed photos to be sent via e-mail. It wasn't like there wasn't even one option for sending photos to someone else. To be fair, a lot of people in the USA weren't sending MMS at the time, and even SMS messages cost a lot. E-mail over the iPhone's then unlimited data plans seemed like a much more attractive option. Also, lots of people wanted to see the photo on a large screen; e-mail was the only way at the time to get a photo from someone and be able to view it on multiple devices.
 
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ahh the App Store, its great to filter 3rd party apps from bogging done the experience and side loading, but I think the original iPhone OS had the essentials. out of the box it now has a lot of bloat and apps, yes they can mostly be removed or disabled...would be great to have a classic mode or light phone version to disable the distractions and extra cruft quickly and all at once.
 
It’s funny when the person posting the article seems to not have owned the first device because the topics mentions are in hindsight and nothing about actual shortcomings of the product launch.
 
J.Dillinger said:
It’s funny when the person posting the article seems to not have owned the first device because the topics mentions are in hindsight and nothing about actual shortcomings of the product launch.
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Yeah I also don't get why people posting these articles present themselves as journalists, without going through the required education. Not having any experience on the topics they write about. Hence me skipping the articles, going straight to the comments (which one has to wade through to get to insightful and informative posts)
 
Eh i still dont use flash, photos always looks worse than without esp with night mode.
 
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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Imagine they keep their iron fist on that policy of banning turn by turn directions, Apple Maps would be far better than Google Maps today on iOS because of that.

And yeah, it is up to regulators to iron out these practices Apple did.
 
A lot has changed since the first iPhone. The displays and the cameras of the current iPhones are fantastic.
 
damn… I remember the launch and the hype like it was yesterday.

it was so cool navigating the original iPhone’s settings and even cooler the next year with the App Store and 3G coming out.

it’s fascinating thinking back to how hyped I was for their trickle of new features year over year.

“whoa 3G is so much faster! I can have ‘Apps’?! cool!”
 
Not sure I’d agree that “the device was significantly more advanced than any other smartphone on the market at the time”. Parts of it were, like the capacitive touch screen and the UI, but other parts were significantly behind - as shown by the various points in this article.

When I got on board with the 3gs, the most infuriating omissions (which I’d had in my PalmOs and Windows Mobile devices previously) were:

1 - folders for notes. They took forever to appear on the iPhone, and I had to use a 3rd party app for that.
2 - folders for apps. I needed a jailbreak for that. The moment Apple added those, I stopped bothering to jailbreak my phone.
 
ZMacintosh said:
ahh the App Store, its great to filter 3rd party apps from bogging done the experience and side loading, but I think the original iPhone OS had the essentials. out of the box it now has a lot of bloat and apps, yes they can mostly be removed or disabled...would be great to have a classic mode or light phone version to disable the distractions and extra cruft quickly and all at once.
Click to expand...
I feel like you could do that with a focus mode.
 
I've always considered the lack of copy & paste more of a feature than a bug. I believe the original vision for iPhone OS was that you wouldn't need to copy and paste telephone numbers, email addresses or web URLs. Instead you were expected to tap on them to be taken to the correct app that uses them.

Of course I remember plenty of occasions when I had to laboriously manually re-type a long URL I wanted to send in an email and heaven forbid you wanted to shift a couple of paragraphs around! 😅

So it was at best a bit of a noble failure. With the later addition of share sheets to send bits of data to various apps many of those shortcomings went away, but I think the addition of copy and paste was necessary in the end. That said, I still find text selection in iOS to be unnecessarily fiddly and error prone (like when it decides to select all the text way further up a webpage even though you're nowhere near touching it! 😩)
 
Michael Scrip said:
And now your iPhone can do all this!

Your iPhone replaces the roomful of equipment found in this 1991 Radio Shack ad

iPhones are expensive, even with the subsidies your mobile carrier provides. But if you add up all the tools you now carry around in your pocket instead of having to toss in your backpack while you travel, the savings are pretty remarkable. A recent post from the Buffalo, NY blog Trending...
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com

View attachment 2334759

:p
Click to expand...

It can't play CDs or cassettes, receive AM/FM radio broadcasts, transmit or receive CB radio, detect radar, scan radio channels, and it's in no way a replacement for a desktop computer. Audio quality is nowhere close to those speakers.

And it doesn't even include headphones any more.

So, other than not being able to do half the stuff on that page, it can do everything on that page.
 
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