What makes the iPhone different?

[twitt3r]

In isolation, no part of it was particularly revolutionary. The innovation was in how they put together all of the different elements into such an appealing form factor. Every other smartphone manufacturer from then on has just copied.

 

[kdarling]

The original iPhone was more about the total package.
It wasn't the first touchscreen phone, or smartphone or phone with a music player, web browser or any of that.

It was actually a terrible phone (from a calling perspective) and didn't even have 3G data speeds, which was widely available before launch.

It was how Apple put it all together that made it "magical" if you will.

This. (Others here also responded with similar thoughts)

Again, the iPhone focused on usability, not feature lists. It's mobile browser was unlike anything else available at the time.

It was certainly well featured. Before it, the best mobile browsers were Opera and Picsel, with perhaps Netfront thrown in.

Picsel especially looked similar, with full page rendering and tap-to-zoom.

In the custom enterprise world, starting from 2000 we had Windows CE touchscreens with full Internet Explorer, making it almost trivial to write websites that worked on both laptops and handhelds. Never understood why Microsoft refused to let the Windows Mobile users have that browser.

Touchscreens common in 2007. However most UI's were built for stylus input. There was nothing 'like' the iPhone, except for maybe the HTC Touch (skinned WinMo6) or Prada KE850.

Or the 2006 planned Linux phones like this one with pinch to zoom, announced months before the iPhone.

Synaptics, who made touchpads popular, was everywhere displaying their idea for a touch phone, the Onyx in 2006:

Other 2006 all-touch concepts included the BenQ BlackBox.

You have to understand that 2006 was a big year for all-touch R&D designs. Naturally, Apple must've thought everyone was going to show production models in Barcelona in early 2007... thus their rush to show off the iPhone two weeks prior. As it turned out, no one else put the effort into manufacturing at the time and Apple got the well deserved publicity.

Due to it's lack of features, it was hard to consider it a smartphone. But you can't deny that it changed they way we think of phones today.

Yes, the iPhone was really a featurephone at first, hardcoded with Apple supplied apps.

The iPhone was the first smartphone with mail, ipod, internet, app store, itunes, a game center, weather all in one phone.

Millions of us had been using smartphones for years with mail, games, music, app stores, Google Maps and realtime weather in homescreen displays. We also had Slingplayer and GPS and other things that the iPhone was missing for a long time after launch.

Apple was able to tell carriers hands off!
No carrier bloatware.
No carrier blocking/slowing OS updates.
Then comes android handing it all back to them =(

Apple locked us into a single store, selling only the apps that THEY approved, and never added Bluetooth file transfers. We cannot remove apps we don't need, like Stocks. We couldn't even change the background for a long time.

Apple also bent over to ATT's wishes to keep some useful apps as WiFi only for a long time, so that they wouldn't strain ATT's EDGE or 3G network.

Then came Android making Apple give some choice back to the consumer. We always need both Ying and Yang

 

[Interstella5555]

The App StoreiOS Makes The iPhone So Special. No competitors are even close with their stores.

Edit; Just noticed you said launch! Like The adverts say the iPhone is the only phone to have an iPod built in, wins it for me every time I hated having to carry around a phone and iPod because the phones music players were so awful.

Fixed that for you. It's the same reason Macs are more appealing to many people, the OS is very, very well done and stupid simple to use on top of that.

 

[boss.king]

This. (Others here also responded with similar thoughts)
-SNIP-
Then came Android making Apple give some choice back to the consumer. We always need both Ying and Yang

Great post. Really balanced and well informed

 

[kdarling]

Great post. Really balanced and well informed

Thanks, that was very kind of you!

From about 1996 onward, my job has included the evaluation of touchscreen smart devices for our field apps.

So for much of the past 15 years I had to keep on top of the latest and greatest, including some very interesting private demos by various hardware and OS makers.

Times have changed though. We used to custom order ruggedized devices (I once asked for a CDMA version of a GSM one to test, and got it within a week) and buy them by the tens of thousands.

Nowadays, everybody wants to use off-the-shelf smartphones. Which is good and bad. They're very inexpensive in comparison, but they also change models all the time