Indeed. Remember the Palm Pilot? Those things eventually ended up quite advanced; I remember buying one in Japan in 2002 with a camera, keyboard, swiveling screen, and so on. The only difference was that it didn't have a 3G radio.
I owned three Palm Treos from 2002 - 2006, including the 600 and the 700p. I _lived_ on those phones for the better part of four years - and I recall waiting for each new release.
So, as a Palm "Fanboy" I can say with certainty that those devices were not even in the same product category as the iPhone. Suggesting that they looked like iOS is farcical at best. I recall struggling for the better part of a week to purchase and install a "Yahtzee game" for the phone. Even after nine months on the 600, I _still_ was unable to reliably hit the proper key sequence to dial a number out of my phone book (the Cancel had the focus by default, so you would "select number, hit enter - and cancel out. Instead you had to "Select number, change focus, _then_ hit number to dial. They finally reversed it on the 700, screwing up 18 months+ of muscle memory that finally developed.
net-net - anybody who ever owned a Palm, and particularly those who used the browser, will state beyond a shadow of a doubt the iPhone and Palm had no relationship, evolutionary or otherwise, to each other.
I lived on the Treo 650 from the day the GSM version came out to when I got my G1 (about a month after it came out). Having used that Treo 650 and many other smartphones of that era (O2 XDA, Sony-Ericsson P900, Nokia Communicator, ...) I will absolutely, unequivocally, beyond the shadow of a doubt say that the iPhone was part of the same evolutionary tree.
Did the iPhone do the things my Treo could do much, much better? Was it a great step forward? Absolutely. The iPhone was and is amazing [1]. Nevertheless, saying that the iPhone stands apart from the broader evolution of mobile devices is either ignorance or a willful misreading of the relevant history.
[1] Though I will admit to finding the idea of paying money for ringtones of music you already owned a repugnant step back.
fpgeek - I guess, insofar that a Human and a chimpanzee are in the same evolutionary tree, the Palm Treo and iPhone are in the same evolutionary tree - but, (perhaps stretching the analogy a little too far) - I would suggest that would put the Palm Treo 600/650/700p in the same species as Australopithecus Afarensis (Lucy) compared to the iPhone Homo Sapien - an absolute disconnect. Do you remember what the Browser was like on that 650?
I think most people would agree that the iPhone 4S is an evolutionary upgrade over the original iPhone. Indeed, many, many of the Enhanced Browser/No Keyboard/App Store Enabled/Touch Screen smartphones today are closely related to the iPhone in a manner that that iPhone is not related to the Palm Treo - that's all I'm trying to say - that Apple did something completely new with the iPhone, rather than just iterating on a previous design.
I will _never_ forget the day I used the iPhone of a friend (I was among those who thought the concept of Apple getting into the "Phone" business was ludicrous, and was determined not to get one) - and used that browser/map. Within 48 hours I had an iPhone, and never looked back on my dear Treo.
I think you've proven my point more than your own.
Just because a particularly successful combination of traits looks like a giant leap doesn't mean it is (consider things like Nobel Prize winners or Olympic medalists born to "ordinary" parents). Similarly, the relationship of the iPhone to its predecessor phones is tighter than you think. Almost all of the traits that made the iPhone what it is were present in the predecessor population of smartphones.
In particular, I'd say the iPhone is what you get if you cross two specific devices and add the mutation of capacitive multi-touch (and the inevitable march of Moore's Law, of course). Those two devices are:
1. the O2 XDA (full touch screen, no keyboard, "enhanced" browser with desktop-like ambitions [even if it was Pocket IE])
2. the Danger Hiptop (consumer focused device with similar built-in apps, centralized app download catalog / store)
Those ancestors were chosen quite carefully, of course. The manufacturer of the O2 XDA was HTC. A bunch of ex-Danger people (most notably Andy Rubin) went on to start Android. A smartphone cross in the iPhone's immediate vicinity was going to happen regardless.
I agree. Comparing those devices to the iPhone is just laughable. The iPhone took everything Palm could do and made it much more elegant and intuitive to use. It did it in such a way that made the older palm devices look so incredibly archaic.
Apples spin wasn't ditching the keyboard as so many people think, it was designing the user interface around finger-based touch, making the interface easy enough for normal people to use, and finally to ship a decent performing browser at a time when most other phones were a nightmare to use when browsing the web (try a N95, also released in 2007, to see what I mean)
I forgot about the communicator because I didn't consider it a smart-enough phone to use. I kept using my Palm Pilot Pro becuse it gave me the productivity I needed. The communicator definitely had a keyboard and apps though, I just didn't find them usable at the time.
By far it is still one of the most bad ass looking phones, with that folding out.
On a side note, the Handspring Visor Phone addon is also worthy of a shoutout, since it was out before the Treo..
I owned a P800 and I consider the iPhone to be in a completely different class. Each of the individual differences is small, but when taken together the feel of using them is quite different.
To be fair, the P800 had a 150mhz processor and 16 MB of RAM and could display a whopping 4,098 colors. It came out around the same time as Windows XP SP1.
The Prada phone is as similar to the iPhone as the android phones people claim are rip offs of the iPhone. Given the short difference in time between their announcements, it is. Lear they were developed concurrently. Therefore, the android devices are derivAtive more of the Prada phone than the iPhone or the design decisions in common to the iPhone and Prada phone are "obvious"
You mean the non-smartphone that was announced a couple weeks before the iPhone? I forget, how was multitouch on it? And the web browser, was it any good?
It's undeniably true that Apple shipped the first good multitouch implementation on a handset. But there were lots of phones with very capable browsers, and a comparatively successful company (Opera) selling them for years before Apple started work on the iPhone.
Which of course is the whole point: ideas are items of trade. Someone thinks of something and someone else improves it. That's the way innovation works. Apple has surely done more of it than any other single company, but they've also, like everyone else, "stolen" far more than they invented themselves.
Claiming that they have some special ground with the iPhone is just a laughable, juvenile flame war. I wish these would stop.
Indeed they don't have special ground with the iPhone. Except maybe for one "thing".
Back in 2007 I joined a new employer. One evening during my new hire training a colleague demo'ed his iPhone he brought over from America to Europe. All other attendees, including myself, were amazed about the multitouch, pinch and zoom photo's, the easiness of use, the awesome GUI and the beautiful design. At the end of the demo there was a deep respectful silence by all of us. Amazement. Thinking about our own phones at the time compared to what we just saw.
Then.. the owner of the iPhone put it gently against his face and caressed it. Yes he actually caressed it. I still remember that image.
This is the "thing". You know, this thing called love. Something that cannot be traded like an item and which still holds true for many.
The HTC Dream didn't look anything like the iPhone either, but Jobs still says Android is a stolen product. So the question is, what did Android steal from Apple?
thats more a personal comment from Jobs...... Apple isnt charging anyone with theft.
before thi ihone, no app store no multi touch, litte integration outside of the blackberry, and smartphones and phones in general sucked by comparison. how quickly we forget how crappy what we had before was.
sure, previous products had lots f features............ but they didnt blowpeoples minds, or make their companies the most valuable ever.
There were app stores in Japanese phones from 1999.
We're not forgetting that they sucked. We're pointing out Apple didn't invent this stuff.
Touchscreens, had those for years. Multi-touch? Lots shown in the ARS article. Here's some http://tactiva.com/demo.html. Includes pinch to zoom, 2 finger rotate objects. Also includes tactile feedback, something no tablet has introed yet AFAIK.
Maps, I had 3d first person maps on my 2004 feature phone, something still missing from any iPhones I know of. They had 2d maps in 2000
Games, Yep, last 5 phones I owned before my iPhone all had downloadable games.
Here's me playing mappy I just purchased from an online app store in 2001
http://blog.greggman.com/blog/what_s_this_/
Webpage browsing? Yep. Wrote my first blog post from a phone in 2001.
Maybe Apple can claim full browsing first on iPhone though I suspect people have earlier examples. I could certainly view full pages through Opera Mini before iPhone.
Music? Several of the phones I owned has music stores built in and some phones advertised how awesome a movie player they were. Synced to PC and everything.
Did Apple take all those features and make them super awesome? YES.
The point is THEY TOOK EXISTING FEATURES. They didn't invent them. They just made them way better. Awesome. It's the little details they did well. It's the sum of the parts. It's pretty hard to pick any one thing for which there is no precedence. Cut and Paste? old. Zoom under pointer? Old. Slide to Unlock? Old. Email? Old. Pages of icons? old. They brought awesome style and design but even my old B/W WinCE machine linked above I didn't need or use any of the buttons except POWER and I could use my finger to control everything else.
Ah, here we are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg
The iPhone is a fine product. The ground it broke was making people want a PDA, not actually inventing the PDA.