Thinking strictly about their impact/relative quality etc *at the time of release* I would have to say the 3G.
It was the first iPhone to come out of the box with an AppStore and the opportunity to expand it with third party apps, making it (for me) the first real smartphone Apple made and the birthplace of the whole iOS ecosystem we have now. It was also the first affordable iPhone for most people and the phone that actually brought iOS to the masses after the slightly botched pricing strategy of the original iPhone. It also finally came with other essential smartphone features already expected of the first gen model like 3G connectivity and GPS.
At the time, in 2008 I had already been using Symbian and windows mobile smartphones for around four years and hadn’t been impressed by the iPhone to begin with, but the 3G changed that and became my first iPhone. Coming from those other systems the iPhone 3G amazed me with its performance - it’s very easy to remember it as slow and limited in retrospect but at the time, running iOS 2.0 and that first generation of apps, it completely blew everything else away.
I’ve been an iPhone user ever since and of course each successive model has gotten better and better, but none have had the same impact, influence and relative excellence over the competition IMHO.
It was the first iPhone to come out of the box with an AppStore and the opportunity to expand it with third party apps, making it (for me) the first real smartphone Apple made and the birthplace of the whole iOS ecosystem we have now. It was also the first affordable iPhone for most people and the phone that actually brought iOS to the masses after the slightly botched pricing strategy of the original iPhone. It also finally came with other essential smartphone features already expected of the first gen model like 3G connectivity and GPS.
At the time, in 2008 I had already been using Symbian and windows mobile smartphones for around four years and hadn’t been impressed by the iPhone to begin with, but the 3G changed that and became my first iPhone. Coming from those other systems the iPhone 3G amazed me with its performance - it’s very easy to remember it as slow and limited in retrospect but at the time, running iOS 2.0 and that first generation of apps, it completely blew everything else away.
I’ve been an iPhone user ever since and of course each successive model has gotten better and better, but none have had the same impact, influence and relative excellence over the competition IMHO.
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