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I used my clamshell feature phone to login to my home pc via ssh. Granted, the typing experience was pretty painful, but it did work. People seem to forget that 'app stores' have been around a lot longer than the iphone. It's just that the earlier versions of app stores, carrier decks, were managed by carriers who cared a lot more about preventing apps from interfering with their business than they did about providing their customers with good, useful apps. And they ran on operating systems that were customized or custom written by carriers who saw them primarily as a marketing tool useful for pushing their more expensive services.

http://www.midpssh.org/




>People seem to forget that 'app stores' have been around a lot longer than the iphone

And they rightly forget them -- they were awful, over-expensive crap. $10 for some BS casual game, $30 for a TODO app etc. And don't get me started on the Java ME crap.


I think that more importantly they were either run by carriers or crippled by carriers.

iPhone changed the whole carrier/manufacturer/customer dynamic for the better (this is coming from a diehard BlackBerry user).




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