OS3 little thought

[sean000]

Difficult to say as Android was Google's answer and a direct response to the iPhone, and may have come significantly later (or not at all) if it wasn't for iPhone.

I think it was only a matter of time. An app market already existed for Palm OS, the technology for touchscreens was there but people were skeptical of giving up the hardware keyboards on their Blackberry, Treo and Sidekick devices. I seem to recall the 3G being where the iPhone really took off, but maybe that's because that's when I noticed my favorite Palm OS developers were all abandoning Palm OS and porting their products to iOS . I think Apple's early release helped get a lot of developers excited about the possibilities. By the time most people adopted the iPhone, a thriving app market was already in place.

 

[Freida]

Speaking of first generation products, do you think Apple should have waited to release the iPhone as well? If they had waited, app developers probably would have focused on creating Android apps until the iPhone was finally perfect enough to be released. By then Android would have had the momentum. Since the iPhone was release early enough in the smartphone market, Apple was able to grab most of the momentum and it took the Google Play store a long time to catch up. The Apple Watch will never be a platform for as many apps as the iPhone and iPad, but third party apps are still important and the watch was released at a time when Apple's competitors had already released some smartwatches and were busy refining them.


Sean

I can only talk for UK right now but I think Apple should have waited and release the original iPhone with 3G as pretty much all the phones in UK then were with 3G and the 3G network was pretty much everywhere (London). So, releasing product that uses data and is like communicator but then have it only on 2G was not wise move. Back then I wanted the original iPhone but not having 3G was a deal breaker. So I waited another year for 3G and got that. I still believe that UK/Europe should have had 3G version from the very beginning considering how wide spread 3G was back then.