Original iPhone's First Four Reviewers Reminisce About Getting Their Hands on It for the First Time

[stockscalper]

I got one the first week they came out. I was thrilled to have it, but also disappointed because it wouldn't do very much. In fact, it wouldn't do a lot for over a year. If you remember apps like calendar weren't native on the phone, but had to sync to a remote server. Alarms were pushed off the server and were hit or miss. Imagine how slow syncing the calendar was on 2G. Still, a whole cottage industry popped up for those kinds of apps and developed a strong cult following like the popular To Do List app Remember the Milk. Even though the phone was very limited in what it could to it was a beautiful device and I was still happy to have something nobody else I knew had

 

[admob71]

I guess context doesn't connect with you? The blackberry for its time was a great texting machine for those that could use it. However, the iPhone made it an easier and better process for the masses. In addition to that, texting on most other devices was atrocious. Got it?

Nope, you seem insistent on rewriting history, at that time, no one seemed to have a problem sending a text on a Nokia 3310, is the virtual keyboard a better option? Of course it is.. but that doesn't make the Nokia of this world unusable and atrocious. You've been called out, deal with it and move on.
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I got one the first week they came out. I was thrilled to have it, but also disappointed because it wouldn't do very much. In fact, it wouldn't do a lot for over a year. If you remember apps like calendar weren't native on the phone, but had to sync to a remote server. Alarms were pushed off the server and were hit or miss. Imagine how slow syncing the calendar was on 2G. Still, a whole cottage industry popped up for those kinds of apps and developed a strong cult following like the popular To Do List app Remember the Milk. Even though the phone was very limited in what it could to it was a beautiful device and I was still happy to have something nobody else I knew had

THIS was the original iPhone, finally someone remembers!!!! Flawed but you could see the potential.

 

[Macaholic868]

I bought the original iPhone about 3 weeks after it was released. I'll never forget holding that device in my hands and thinking "this is the future" even though it was clearly incomplete at the time. My friends thought I was nuts for shelling out $700 for a phone. Even though it was AT&T with Edge instead of 3G, having a touchscreen phone with a desktop class web browser that doubled as an iPod and a PDA was a game changer. After owning one there was no going back.

Even though Apple's "solution" to apps, web based apps, was laughable at the time the jail break community sprung up pretty quickly and after that it's potential was clear and you knew Apple would be forced to release an SDK even if they weren't initially inclined to do so. What cracks me up is the iPad. When they released it I thought "what idiot would buy a slightly bigger iPhone" (as I type his on an iPad Pro). Oops.....

 

[dojoman]

I remember the original iOS not having copy and paste feature.
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I bought the original iPhone about 3 weeks after it was released. I'll never forget holding that device in my hands and thinking "this is the future" even though it was clearly incomplete at the time. My friends thought I was nuts for shelling out $700 for a phone. Even though it was AT&T with Edge instead of 3G, having a touchscreen phone with a desktop class web browser that doubled as an iPod and a PDA was a game changer. After owning one there was no going back.

Oh god! I remember Edge speed, back then it was pretty fast for web browsing.

 

[casjohnr]

I fondly remember buying one here in the UK for £269 on launch even though I had no intention of buying a 24 month iPhone contract, lo and behold someone managed to find a way to unlock them for Pay As You Go / SIM Only usage shortly after

Probably why I ended up keeping it all the way to the iPhone 5 as by then Apple had wisened up and sold SIM free at a much higher price! Sadly it fell to pieces a bit as I fell with it in my pocket once which caused quite a bit of damage but it still went on strong until replacement!

The only regret I have is I was extremely close to purchasing two at launch and keeping one brand new and sealed, they're worth a few quid these days!

 

[Pentium]

I will never forget the moment I got the iPhone in 2007! it was really a magical device by that time, after almost 10 years of Palm and Pocket PC devices!

 

[melendezest]

This is actually a testament to how well Apple makes their products. They simply last. Even if the first iPhones are no longer supported through iOS, they still operate and function normally after all these years. That's what I appreciate about Apple, is they put out excellent hardware.

I think it is a testament of how well Apple used to make their products.

The sad thing is that this would be true of my two 4s, if Apple didn't prevent us from reverting to the OS version that we want/runs best on the device.

That very thing made them my first and last iPhones. Sammy has kept my (and my family's) business since then, because Apple forced it to happen by not giving me what I want and/or not letting me do what I want, when I want to do it, how I want to do it.

 

[xitongzou]

Haha... one part of that video.. the guy said 'wait there were touchscreens before on other devices?' yeah of course, palm pilots and pocket pcs and windows tablets have had resistive touchscreens for years. Its the iPhone that brought capacitative touch to the masses. I would say the App store was really revolutionary, that was in 2008. It really did create an entire industry by itself. Before the Appstore I think you had to jailbreak the original iPhone to get third party apps on it.

 

[Bacillus]

I mostly agree, my rod-shaped friend. The biggest complaint I have about TC is that quality control seems of less importance than it was under Jobs. If Steve was my boss I'd be scared ******** to make a mistake. Tim seems much less threatening. I wanna work for Timmy!

As Cue's or Ive's boss, I'd put my appreciation of them in a 5 lines notice.

 

[Keirasplace]

Whaha !
Apply a few metrics (percentage of patents realized, R&D expenditures versus realised innovations, immobile capital piled up) to revise your own blah-paganda.
Benchmark with more competitive industries (car, aerospace, pharmaceutical) and the number of new designs they come up with as a yearly average vs Apple's.
Then come back.

Are you for real buddy. Give me a break.

 

[Bacillus]

Are you for real buddy. Give me a break.

OK, it will take some time and imagination to see the difference between a new iPad, iPad 3, the old new 2015 iPad (all so ehh... similar. What a 300 man design team can accomplish in 4 years...luckily we have iPhone...ooh no, exactly the same models refurbed in that timeframe. So back to iPhone 1 to glorify innovation)

 

[RamGuy]

I also had a n95 around that time, I have to disagree, the Carl zeiss optics took camera photography to a next level compared to most of the dross out there.

I'm not saying the Nokia N95 didn't feature a better camera compared to the original iPhone. I'm saying that cellphone cameras in general, including the Nokia N95 didn't take very good pictures so I didn't see any value in taking pictures on my phone to begin with at that time.

 

[Keirasplace]

OK, it will take some time and imagination to see the difference between a new iPad, iPad 3, the old new 2015 iPad (all so ehh... similar. What a 300 man design team can accomplish in 4 years...luckily we have iPhone...ooh no, exactly the same models refurbed in that timeframe. So back to iPhone 1 to glorify innovation)

Go away.

 

[kdarling]

Stil with all the advanced features it was a better and simpler phone and texting vehicle than everything else.

I disagree on the texting part. Blackberrys come to mind, for one thing, or any other of dozens of phones of the time with keyboards.

How people saw the iPhone, clearly depended on what they had seen / used before.

For example, a lot of people had only ever had flip phones and thus were amazed at what a handheld device could do.

Others who already had touchscreen smartphones with 3G, GPS, video camera, copy&paste, Slingplayer, Google Maps, Pandora, medical encyclopedias and third party app stores, saw the simplistic iPhone as a cute but crippled feature phone, at least until it grew up a bit a year later.

In our corporate handheld lab where we had made touch apps since the 1990s, we watched the demo hoping to see some new UI ideas, but saw none. Everything from finger friendly buttons to inertial scrolling had been done for decades in field and industrial touch apps, or was known of, like multi-touch.

--

As someone noted, the primary successful thing that Apple did was to actually ship a mass consumer device with a finger friendly UI, instead of keeping it in the lab. Real artists ship. Plus it really helped that they were Apple. Similar devices from other, often smaller entities, had been ignored by the press and public.

 

[admob71]

I'm not saying the Nokia N95 didn't feature a better camera compared to the original iPhone. I'm saying that cellphone cameras in general, including the Nokia N95 didn't take very good pictures so I didn't see any value in taking pictures on my phone to begin with at that time.

Bizarrely, that's exactly what you are saying old boy. The iPhone blew the n95 away in pretty much every area is what you wrote. So similar to the texting guy, there seems to be a lot of back tracking when history is remembered correctly.... and not in this fantasy world where the original iPhone was a supreme piece of kit.

 

[ShufromChina]

Didn't start using iPhone until 4S. flip phones before that. Even then, what it cost for owning a smartphone was humongous compared to now. The Apple tax only added up on top of that.

Thanks to technology, it costs half of that nowadays.

 

[Wilsonka]

3.5 inch display, edge technology, no gps driving directions, 2 megapixel camera, no copy and paste, no App Store. And it was revolutionary!

Shows you how spoiled we have have become that we complain about little things about the current models.

Exactly. The one and only "revolutionary" thing was the pinch-zoom action. You can also call the UI revolutionary – but that is only as a matter of taste.

To be honest ANY Nokia running Symbian at the time could do more and faster. Even those that had a chocolate-bar design. And those had video-calls on 3G. Remember that you had to wait till the iPhone 4 to have video-calls (but not the already working and standardized version, but Apple's own FaceTime). The first iPhone did not even have video recording that was standard on any camera equipped phone by the time.

I remember how my friends with iPhones used to brag to me that they can browse the Internet and copy information from web-pages (not on a 1st gen iPhone though) and paste it to e-mails and so on – at any time, ON their phone. And I didn't get it because I had been already doing the same for years with my battered Communicator. I also remember that at first sight I said that the UI is only a very much simplified version of the dashboard of MacOSX.

And the thing which Steve Jobs ridiculed in his keynote was the very thing which kept me from having my first iPhone (a 4) for quite a long time. And that is the keyboard. Just as the first reviewers said it is a pain to type anything on a touchscreen. I could have had typing while driving with the real buttons (it is just that I "never" did it due to driving safety issues).

Saying all these I have to admit that I had several iPhones throughout the last few years (since 2011) and all my family members have iPhones now for the ecosystem and I really do love it. It really is great and since I had several Android phones as company phones meanwhile I can also say that my preference is absolutely with the iOS. I also love the "fenced garden" system that prevents the phone from being clogged and keeps it working.

So although the iPhone is really great and superior to all competitors on the market right now, there was NOTHING revolutionary in the first iPhone. Only one: Steve Jobs. He was revolutionary. He was a genius who could sell the iPhone as something that the world has never seen before. Something that changes everything. Something that changes how people see technology and how they use it. And that is true, because the very same features that made the iPhone great and have been available for years before became common and came out of the realms where only geeks (or semi-geeks like me) could and were willing to use them. And that really is revolution. Not hardware-wise, not software-wise, but marketing-wise. The first iPhone was a revolutionary marketing device and an inferior smartphone.

 

[bambooshots]

Wow, people still paid in cash back then.

 

[kdarling]

Part of what made the iPhone a hit was that objects in that touchscreen world have their own physics. You can thank Bas Ording for some of it, like how lists have momentum when you flick them, or how they do a little bounce when you get to the end.

The thing about intensely developing touch systems, is that many people independently reinvent the same things out of need or by happy accident (flick scrolling is often the latter). So every developer thinks they invented the wheel first. However, some have the corporate backing to file patents, for better or worse.

For example, inertial scrolling predated the iPhone by at least 15 years, and even by the same name.

As for bounceback at the end of a list or screen boundary, that too had been done and likely even demoed to Apple around 2001 by a third party, but Ording enhanced it a bit by first going off screen.

Exactly. The one and only "revolutionary" thing was the pinch-zoom action. .

And that had not only been around for decades, and demoed to the public in 2006 at TED, but even announced in a phone two months before the iPhone was ever shown off:

These historical facts do not, of course, take away from how nice the iPhone combination was.