back to article How Apple exploded Europe's crony capitalism

Apple's iPhone wasn't just a shiny new thing that was irritatingly and madly overhyped. Before long, it shattered a benevolent kind of crony capitalism in which Europeans took great pride, but that was short-serving the public. And it needed an outsider to do this. Ten years ago, Europe could be excused for feeling a little …

  1. Aitor 1

    Absolutely agree

    I was fed up with telcos, and I worked for years as a consultant for them.. they just broke the phones on purpose.

    And damn nokia, and its internal war + wrong perception of clients.

    1. Lotaresco

      Re: Absolutely agree

      It's damn them, damn them all. The history of the industry reads like a list of lost opportunities.

      Apple make some interesting things, although inevitably all of the things they make are flawed to some extent because that's how life is. No one can achieve perfection. There's lots of room for improvement.

      It would have seemed sensible for the handset manufacturers to respond to the challenge and up their game to compete effectively with Apple. To exploit Apple's weaknesses.

      RIM had an edge with secure communication technology but didn't seem to realise that there was value in improving the handset and the services. By the time they woke up Apple had got themselves established. Even now, Apple are not offering as good a corporate or government system, but continue to nibble away at that market.

      The other makers seemed to mess around at the time doing things like making a device look a bit like an iPhone but without the functions of the iPhone. It was like trying to compete with BMW by sticking some plastic body panels onto a tired old model of car. Oh hang on, wasn't that what Rover tried?

      I'm not sure why execs didn't get that this was something that was going to encroach on their market and that further assaults on their market would happen just as soon as another maker or consortium produced something that offered similar look and feel to the iPhone. It's a story that had already happened elsewhere and not just with Apple. Manufacturers get cosy apparently thinking they can do the same thing with minor variation for ever and then the new kid on the block steals their market.

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Re: Absolutely agree

        >RIM had an edge with secure communication technology but didn't seem to realise that there was value in improving the handset and the services. By the time they woke up Apple had got themselves established. Even now, Apple are not offering as good a corporate or government system, but continue to nibble away at that market.

        RIM do software for iPhones these days, a mate of mine - a MOD contractor - has been issued a locked-down and RIM'ed iPhone. A couple of years back, it was announced that IBM were to start doing corporate iOS software (that I haven't heard much of since means nothing, because it is not my area). It appears that in between appealing to executives and being more secure than Android, Apple got a good chunk of the corporate market without trying too hard.

        1. bazza Silver badge

          Re: Absolutely agree

          @Dave126,

          "It appears that in between appealing to executives and being more secure than Android, Apple got a good chunk of the corporate market without trying too hard."

          I disagree so some extent. Apple haven't done a single thing to specifically get the corporate market, and I don't think they give a damn about it either. They never bothered doing anything in their computers to help businesses either, not really.

          They aim their products at the consumer market, which is where the big money is. Corporate users are welcome to buy of course...

          What I mean is that there's nothing in Apple products that helps corporate admins fit them nicely into a (often necessarily) controlled corporate IT environment. OS-X can do domain authentication and browse file shares, but that's it. The MDM solutions that exist for iOS are terrible kludges really, sticking plasters applied on top of an unhelpful OS. It doesn't even do VPNs properly.

          Killing BOYD

          With little real support for business use in both iOS and Android, BYOD now seems to have become:

          "Your work mobile is an iPhone we've lent you that's locked down to the point where it's not worth stealing it":

          This suits Apple very well. Apple get to sell 2 phones, not one, and they still don't have to do anything technological to support that. But us drones have to carry 2 phones.

          Android is the same but worse by the way - it doesn't do a very good job of talking to Exchange servers, and so the MDM solutions for it are quite often even kludgier. Yes I know, Exchange servers, domains, it's all so much old bollocks, but not every company (especially outside the USA) is prepared to jump into the Google, Apple or MS clouds

          The only mobile company that did understand the needs of business and BYOD was BlackBerry, and built a mobile OS specifically to accomodate that - BB10, and particularly it's Balance feature and the 2 phone numbers in one device party trick.

          This is still the most elegant solution to the BYOD problem. It's far superior to sticking a MDM plaster on top of a consumer focused mobile OS. It's the only thing out there that truly makes it plausible for an employee to have one single phone for both work and personal use, with the right level of control for both parties and strong separation of the business and personal domains, and still be easy and pleasurable to use. It definitely doesn't feel like something "added on", it's right at the core of the whole OS, mail client, calendar, apps store, the lot.

          Unfortunately, BlackBerry, like a lot of other companies, didn't understand the art of doing business.

          Balance is really good, but it also takes a lot of getting your head round. By the time it came out it was already too late, and very few people had the motivation to go look at clever ways of solving the BOYD problem.

          If Apple cared about chasing the corporate market they'd have bought up BlackBerry just to get their hands on Balance and incorporated the idea into iOS. They haven't.

          Forget the Business Market, it's Irrelevant

          Apple, and to some extent Google with Android, taught the world that chasing fat corporate sales was a pointless myth. The corporate market is too small to bother with. The consumer market, that's the thing.

          Having learned that lesson, Microsoft went off and did Window 8. Whoopsie!

          The PC is really a business tool. It became cheap enough for consumers to buy it. Turns out consumers didn't really want PCs, they wanted mobiles and tablets. Nowadays one looks at the PC market and wonders whether one will still be able to buy an affordable workstation for one's business needs in 5, 10 years time.

          I'm no fan of Apple or Jobs, but Jobs did get one thing right. It's the software that matters. As soon as electronics had advanced to the point where a battery powered handheld could just about support an advanced graphical user interface it was inevitable that someone somewhere would do one. Jobs saw that, jumped early (the first iPhone models were absolute bollocks really), cleaned up.

          For the rest of the industry the warning signs were there. The Apple Newton may have been poor, but there was the seeds of something there.

          Nokia are perhaps the worst offender. They acquried Psion's OS and software stack - the Psion 5mx was a true masterpiece that's yet to be equalled - and threw the opportunity away. Nokia had more than the seeds of an idea, they had something that actually worked. Nokia in effect had a 10 year head start on Apple, and cocked it up. But then again, Nokia was run by hardware guys.

          Apple's Future

          It's looking dodgy. Their designers are now so up their own arses that one seriously wonders whether they can recover. They need to stop chasing "form" and get back to designing things that people will actually lust after. Can't plug an iPhone 7 into a Macbook, even for charging? Job's would have had a fit at the idea.

          Weirdly, Microsoft are making a ton of cash on Apples turf - premium laptops. Surface notebooks sell veeery well. Apple need to move fast to make sure that there's no possibility of a resurgency in the mobile space for Microsoft. Apple have a lot of laurels these days, difficult not to rest on them

          Apple's product line up is, well, boring and disjointed, and in some ways very very annoying. Whereas MS is possibly be about to launch a good mobile to go along with good laptops. If only a few key mobile apps make it to Surface phone, people might just start wondering whether they need an iPhone and its frailties at all.

          1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

            Re: Absolutely agree

            "the Psion 5mx was a true masterpiece that's yet to be equalled"

            I had one of those, and its hinges broke for no apparent reason.

            Connectivity.. I can't remember having it connected as it was hard to do so.

            But it was nice for its time.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Absolutely agree

            With little real support for business use in both iOS and Android, BYOD now seems to have become:

            "Your work mobile is an iPhone we've lent you that's locked down to the point where it's not worth stealing it":

            These two statements are contradictory. The reason it is possible to lock down an iOS device is because Apple does support business usage via its Device Enrolment Program.

            The degree of lockdown is completely up to the company. If yours is unusable then that's because your employer chose to make it so.

            The 'not worth stealing' aspect is a big bonus to us. We have near zero thefts of iPads and iPhones because thieves mostly now know that they are impossible to reset and sell on.

            1. bazza Silver badge

              Re: Absolutely agree

              @2+2=5,

              "These two statements are contradictory. The reason it is possible to lock down an iOS device is because Apple does support business usage via its Device Enrolment Program."

              No they're not. The mainstream MDM solutions are all about allowing a company to make a device less the users and more the company's. They're designed so that the user is allowed to do less and the company is restricting it more. That's not BYOD, that's "it's a company phone that does company things, not a phone you the user can do anything you like on. It's CACD (Carry Around a Company Device).

              The only way that this really results in anything like a BYOD environment that the user has normal rights on is if the company places few restrictions on what the user can do at all. Which is dumb because there's be zero point of the MDM and "Device Enrolment" at all (apart from slicker roll-outs).

              I've yet to see anyone at all use an MDM encumbered iOS or Android device as their own personal phone too, or for their own personal accounts / social media / etc.

              "The degree of lockdown is completely up to the company. If yours is unusable then that's because your employer chose to make it so."

              I refer back to my previous point. MDM + minimal / zero lockdown is not really MDM'ed at all. It's just a personal phone that maybe the company can remote wipe if they want to. Bit of a stretch to call that "managed". To get any real assurances concerning protecting company data the company has to lock it down.

              For example, time and again there's been highly dodgy data stealing malware scattered all over Google's app store, and Android itself is generally wide open to vulnerabilities for very long periods of time. It's the last OS on earth that any company with any concerns at all about their data security would allow an employee to install arbitrary apps on a company mobile.The only real answer is to stop the employee installing apps at all, and then it's useless as a personal device.

              In comparison to BlackBerry's Balance and it's multi-level security system with its cryptographic separation of company and personal data and slick unified view of both personal / private email and calendars, the MDM approach on iOS and Android is pretty lame brained. They're essentially doing little more than turning stuff off and maybe installing clunky alternate email clients / calendars / etc.

              That's not adding any supporting functionality at all, it's taking it away. But it is right up there, bang in line with what company admins already do (lock down PCs to the n'th degree, more of the same please). It's all distressingly unimaginative, admins don't have to think, and Apple and Google don't really have to do much to support this.

          3. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            'Microsoft making cash on Apple's turf'

            It isn't as though Apple had the 'premium laptop' segment all to itself, because while a Macbook will run Windows well, it isn't generally the best option out there if you have zero interest in running macOS. Surface isn't stealing any sales from Apple, it is stealing them from Wintel partners like Dell.

            1. bazza Silver badge

              Re: 'Microsoft making cash on Apple's turf'

              @DougS,

              "It isn't as though Apple had the 'premium laptop' segment all to itself"

              For a long time all PC laptops, even top of the line ones, were clunky, plastic and horrible even if the internals were pretty good. Meanwhile Macbooks were aluminium, sleek and lovely. It's only comparatively recently that the PC market has worked out that nicely made good looking premium stuff sells, and sells well. It took them only 10 years of watching Macbook sky high profits to work that out.

              "Surface isn't stealing any sales from Apple, it is stealing them from Wintel partners like Dell."

              Well, MacWorld reported that Apples Q4 results for iPhone, iPad and Mac sales were all down. Yet everywhere I look I read news of the boom in sales of MS's Surface line. Apple sell less computers, MS sell more computers. Call me old fashioned, but if that isn't sales stealing I don't know what is.

              There's been plenty of people, even here on El Reg's forums, announcing that they've jumped off Apple's ship too. Seems that the delta between Windows 10 and OSX is small enough that the availability of things like standard USB, ethernet, HDMI and SD slots is more valuable than slimness, adapters, and an increasingly poorly performing OS-X.

              The fact that MS (yes, boring old aesthetically challenged MS) can make money at all from selling a premium notebook / tablet thingy running Windows 10 is, by conventional thinking, unbelievable. Aesthetics is supposed to be what Apple are best at, yet it's clearly not enough to preserve their sales figures.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: 'Microsoft making cash on Apple's turf'

                How can MacWorld report Apple's Q4 sales when Apple hasn't reported them yet? They're just guessing. And Apple's iPhone and iPad sales are irrelevant to the question of whether Surface is affecting Macbook sales. The growth of Surface sales is irrelevant too - it was starting from a pretty low point as it took them several iterations before they stumbled on a formula (making their "tablet" be a fully functional Windows laptop) that consumers wanted.

                Even if Surface sales grow and Macbook sales fall that doesn't mean that Surface buyers would have bought the Macbook otherwise. The entire Windows PC market has seen sales fall for five straight years, so there are plenty of OEMs showing sales drops who could be losing sales to Microsoft. Or maybe it has something to do with how long Apple took to update the Macbook line (the current quarter is the first where all sales will be of the new line, Q4 will only have a month of sales of the new model) or people don't like the lack of USB-A ports, or whatever. Maybe some are buying an iPad Pro instead. Maybe enough have Macbooks still going strong and the new Intel CPUs don't offer enough of a performance jump they are going to wait for Apple's next update in a year or two.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Absolutely agree

      Orlowski is right in what he says except for one point: he attributes everything to the first iPhone whereas most of what he says came with the 2nd and 3rd generation iPhones.

      The main selling point of the 1st gen iPhone was visual voicemail. Imagine if every email, text and tweet you receive came in the form of voicemail and you had to listen to each one in order, making notes as you went? Well, that was what it was like for business people in the US before the iPhone. That and having to pay to receive texts.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Absolutely agree

        In hindsight it was a good idea for Apple to not do 'apps' until iOS 2. If they had done them from day one, a lot of the reviews / discussions about the iPhone would have revolved around the fact there are no apps. Apple chose to let it win on the things it did well (UI, browser, plans that include unlimited data) to build up market momentum. By the time the second gen came out along with iOS 2, the App Store announcement was greeted with fanfare, and developers knew they had a large audience of eager (and fairly well off) customers at the ready.

        Yeah, GPS didn't come until the second gen hardware and MMS didn't come until iOS 3.0, but those were both value add - not something very many people used on their previous phones so most wouldn't miss them. Apple wasn't designing a phone to steal existing smartphone customers, at least at first, so they didn't have to match them feature for feature. They were going after a much larger market: everyone else!

        With the 3gs they made a phone that even owners of stone age smartphones like Windows Mobile and Blackberry had a hard time arguing against (though of course some were in denial for a couple more years, my girlfriend hung on to her Blackberry until the 4S)

      2. goldcd

        To be fair, as "never an owner of an iPhone"

        I'd still f'in love visual voicemail.

        Not really something I have to use much any more, but there is still egregious voicemail fuck-wittery out there.

        Three spring to mind. Any chance of that little GSM standard voicemail icon? Oh no, you just send me a text at some random future time, alerting me to the fact I missed a call whilst I was sat with all-the-bars on my phone

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      A UI/UX that normal people could use?

      Andrew (for whom I bow to none in my admiration) is rabidly anti- European institutions. The GSM/Symbian slant is praps a teeny stretch?

      Ie, surely Apple won because iPhone did a UI/UX that normal people could use, with affordable data "out of the box" (XDA fans etc: you never had the former.) (Plus, in later versions, Stevie took on the Music Biz and won.)

      But the Symbian deal was a disaster in product/UX terms. As others have said, "Nokia was run by hardware guys." A quote, from Andrew's old interview with Symbian's Head of Design at the time:

      > On one of the four platforms, we had to combine the spec of our previous Psion applications and user interface, with the specification of a new device Nokia had been developing. So there’s me locked in a room with about 15 Nokia designers, who, it slowly transpires, view Symbian as a software house they have just bought in order to deliver their product.

      > I explain to them the thinking behind the various things in the Psion UI — why it just saves changes automatically, why a second tap means “open”, why it has infoprints [informational messages] in the corner, why ToDos appear on the main Diary screen, all that kind of stuff that we’d worked out over the years, and they listen and then they say “yes, but we want you to do this”.

      In the 10 years from 1987-1997 the Psion UX went from the Organiser-II to the Series5. If they'd been given another 10 years - to 2007 - do you think they'd have been iPhone-competitive?

  2. 0laf

    CRTs

    They used CRTs because that's all they had for dressing the sets. But you can see in some shows (ST TNG is the one I can remember best) the start of tablet computer type ideas with non-functional props and their flat touch panel LCARS controls. But where they needed something to work and change they had to use a CRT coz that's all they had.

    The set dressing budget wouldn't extend to replicating imaginary tech.

    1. Ian K

      Re: CRTs

      An honourable mention for that goes to the film Runaway (1984) - they wanted their characters to use portable flat screens, but as you say that simply wasn't an option at the time. So they used "loose" CRTs filmed at angles where only the front of the screen was visible, and positioned as if they were being cradled in arms, resting on table tops, etc...

      For the most part if worked reasonably well.

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Re: CRTs

        The IBM-branded tablet computers in Kubrick's 2001: Space Odyssey. The props don't move on from their spot on Bowman and Poole's desk, so had ether a CRT or projector mounted beneath them.

        Yet Heywood Floyd, a big fish in the organisation, doesn't have a tablet - he has to go to an ATT booth to 'Skype' his daughter from orbit.

        1. ma1010
          Headmaster

          Re: CRTs

          In Clarke's book 2001: A Space Odyssey, those devices were called "newspads" and were only for receiving/presenting information, not sending it. They had no "phone" capability at all, much less videophone capability built in. There's nothing like a cell phone in either the movie or book, AFAIK. One place where reality outstripped science fiction.

          However, in Robert Heinlein's book Space Cadet, written in the 1950's, there a scene where one of the characters gets a call on his "pocket phone," so I guess it's really just a matter of what a particular author dreamed up.

        2. Loud Speaker

          Re: CRTs

          I frequently go into phone boxes to use my mobile - because it drowns the street noise and gives some privacy (the stench is a bit of a downside though).

          Disclaimer: I am not a captain in the starfleet, and don't even play one if the bedroom!

        3. jelabarre59

          Re: CRTs

          Yet Heywood Floyd, a big fish in the organisation, doesn't have a tablet - he has to go to an ATT booth to 'Skype' his daughter from orbit.

          Well, the film was called "2001", not "2017"...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: CRTs

      Speaking of CRTs, is there anything more charming than the little CRTs with giant magnifiers hovering over their front in Terry Gilliam's Brazil? I just love those lovely B&W screens and their typewriter-like keyboards!

      "I'm a bit of a wiz at these things."

  3. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Mobile money

    Not that I particularly like any corporation using my electronic wallet as an interest free loan or a way for them to make money from commissions from the payment services chain, but I'd like Apple and Google using it the least.

    And m-pesa works, it's not just a card wallet for buying frapuchinos.

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Mobile money

      >Not that I particularly like any corporation using my electronic wallet as an interest free loan or a way for them to make money from commissions from the payment services chain, but I'd like Apple and Google using it the least.

      Could you share your rationale? The traditional card issuers wanted a big percentage of every transaction, and to know what you were buying. The Apple model is a small percentage per transaction, and neither Apple nor the card issuer know what you have bought because it is token-based. By saying you'd like Apple the least, you leave us in the dark as to exactly what it is you find objectionable.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    If you use British TV shows for designs of the future...

    ... they were actually mostly very bad at it. Both U.F.O. and Space 1999 were frankly terrible, and became quickly outdated. I still have fits of laugh when their computers output data on narrow stripes of paper...

    Star Trek at least did some more efforts (but a way to retain people on chairs when under attack...). Also employing often the little trick of avoiding to show what the character look at on some devices (i.e. Spock "scope", or the ) - or using animations and projections ('60s CRTs would have looked really ugly).

    But I'm quite sure Space 1999 is what many smartphone designers had in mind for a while...

    1. kmac499

      Re: If you use British TV shows for designs of the future...

      For the Defence I offer exhibit A:-- 'BOX' in StarCops. Nathan Springs voice recognising, AI based wirelessly connected PDA; not unlike the modern Amazon Echo and Alexa.

    2. jelabarre59

      Re: If you use British TV shows for designs of the future...

      If you use British TV shows for designs of the future...

      ... they were actually mostly very bad at it.

      I don't know, "Zen" (Blake's 7) could have been Siri and Alexa's father... And their "Watson" (Orac) was semi-portable.

      Yet I find the special effects in DrWho from the 60's and 70's look better in retrospect than the attempts at CGI and chroma-key they tried in the 80's.

  5. Oh Homer

    America isn't Crony Capitalism?

    Really?

    How about Citizens United, the Koch brothers and the Military Industrial Complex, just for starters?

    Isn't Apple the American company that keeps trying to screw customers with non-standard components that you can only buy from Apple at extortionate prices, but which the EU keeps forcing to adopt industry standards to protect consumer choice?

    Thank goodness for EU "cronyism", frankly.

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: America isn't Crony Capitalism?

      >Isn't Apple the American company that keeps trying to screw customers with non-standard components that you can only buy from Apple at extortionate prices, but which the EU keeps forcing to adopt industry standards to protect consumer choice?

      Apple had a 13 pin iPod/iPhone plug, then a Lightening plug. That's it. Either are available for next to nothing from numerous 3rd parties from a petrol station or supermarket near you.

      Over the same period, my non-Apple devices have required USB B, MiniUSB, microUSB barrel chargers of two sizes (Nokia), headphone adaptor (Nokia), three types of power connector and headphone adaptor ditto (Samsung) and some similarly daft stuff from Sony Ericsson. Not only that, but these never-twice-the-same-plug devices shipped with cables hardwired to the mains power adaptors. It was incredibly annoying, and I'm glad the EU stepped in and standardised microUSB. Oh Wait! It turns out that microUSB was not as user friendly as the orientation-agnostic Lightening cable, so now we have to adopt orientation-agnostic USB-C!

      Not having owned any Apple kit, I can't tell how irritated 'fanbois' were at having to change their cable type once in nearly fifteen years. I won't lose any sleep on their behalf, though. Lucky sods.

      1. O RLY
        Headmaster

        Re: America isn't Crony Capitalism?

        *Lightning. The Apple cables don't lighten anything..

        1. David 132 Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: America isn't Crony Capitalism?

          @O RLY *Lightning. The Apple cables don't lighten anything..

          ...except your wallet?

          /cheapshot

      2. Oh Homer
        Headmaster

        Re: "a Lightening plug. That's it"

        You forgot about Apple's proprietary HDD connectors, their infamous pentalobular screws, and the fact that MacOS is synthetically tied to ridiculously overpriced Apple hardware using DRM and a highly dubious EULA, as just a few more examples.

        Certainly other vendors have also tried similar lock-in tactics over the years, but Apple is the undisputed champion of shafting consumers, and the only thing defending us from these chancers is those "meddling EU autocrats", as neoliberals like to call them.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I had to laugh at this

    As I'd hoped a decade ago, and have said many times since, you don't have to own an iPhone or even like Apple to appreciate the change it wrought.

    If anyone had put this in a comment there would have been far more downvotes than up

    Off you go then...

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: I had to laugh at this

      It's 2017. Maybe even the denizens of the Reg forums have realised that enforcing an echo-chamber is of no use to man or beast?

    2. Grikath
      Meh

      Re: I had to laugh at this

      It's Orlowsky unabashedly showing his Fanboi colours. Nothing new here.

  7. Paul Crawford Silver badge

    I think the biggest single point is that Apple saw the "phone" as a computer that made calls, while most others saw it as a phone that could do the odd bit of computer work. As Andrew pointed out, the main "customers" of Nokia, etc, were the mobile networks and they were adverse to anything that would *use* those networks to any useful degree and with poor bit rates we had WAP to make it usable, but that was really a misery to use.

    1. kmac499

      "I think the biggest single point is that Apple saw the "phone" as a computer that made calls,"

      Common mistake,. some XEROX engineers I knew claimed that their ground breaking computers failed because senior management couldn't change mindset from charging customers per copy. Plus they were fantastically expensive.

    2. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

      The real reason Apple's model won was that they invested massively in software (touch interface, nice finger friendly, clear and logical).

      Other phone manufacturers looked at the hardware specs, and then had a small team to try to hack Symbian to work with the model. Or, even worse, Windows CE (or whatever they called it). And Symbian was a relatively late development -before that it was even worse.

      So Apple's model won becase Apple made the original Mac and has ever since invested in the user interface.

      In a way the other manufacturers tried to treat their smartphones as shrunken PCs, wheras Apple realised a phone needed a radically different UI (which in turn required a massive investment).

    3. imaginarynumber

      "I think the biggest single point is that Apple saw the "phone" as a computer that made calls, while most others saw it as a phone that could do the odd bit of computer work. As Andrew pointed out, the main "customers" of Nokia, etc, were the mobile networks and they were adverse to anything that would *use* those networks to any useful degree and with poor bit rates we had WAP to make it usable, but that was really a misery to use."

      The iPhone was yet another in a line of PDAs with phone functions.

      Vodafone sold VDA touchscreen smartphones.

      O2 sold XDA touchscreen smartphones.

      Orange sold SPV touchscreen smartphones.

      T-Mobile sold MDA touchscreen smartphones.

      Everyone of those Windows Mobile devices had (data hungry) HTML browsers (WM never had a native WAP browser)...

      And let's not forget that iOS did not start outselling Windows Mobile until late 2009 (and within a year Android was outselling iOS).

    4. GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

      Having been a user of various Compaq Ipaq PDA devices I disagree, my first Windows Phone was pretty much an Ipaq that made phone calls.

  8. Fat_Tony

    WIDtf

    Nice article, no idea what a WID is though

    1. analyzer

      Re: WIDtf

      Not sure ... Wireless Information Device or What It Do?

      With the state of WAP back then either was appropriate

      1. Lotaresco

        Re: WIDtf

        Ah, voices of callow youth. Way back <fx: wavy lines> at the turn of the millennium Wireless Information Devices were all the rage. Symbian were pushing the WID as hard as they could, WAP was seen as the way to provide information over a wireless network that could be shown on tiny LCD screens (in monochrome if necessary). It reduced most web sites to a cascading series of links that went on forever. It was like using Gopher but with some tiny low-res images.

        I had a look at it and wrote a paper "WAP is crap" for my employers. It was fairly clear even then that developments would leave WAP behind because no one in their right mind would want a 96x95 pixel or even a 320x240 pixel view of the WWW.

        1. mark 177

          Re: WIDtf

          I worked in WAP around 1998-2001 and I have never heard of a WID, despite attending several conferences dedicated to WAP.

          We used to call them WAP phones.

      2. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

        Re: WIDtf

        Oh, yeah, WAP! Fogot it was called that!

        What a joke! Had a Sony with WAP. OMG...

        No wonder Apple won.

        1. GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

          Re: WIDtf

          I had WAP on my Nokia 7110. I wrote a WAP App that retrieved and displayed emails from an MS Exchange server. But this was about seven years before the first iPhone. When the first iPhone came out, I had a Windows phone with an Exchange client on it.

  9. fattybacon

    It's all about the data stupid

    For years the mobile contracts would only advertise the number of call minutes and texts you got, you could barely find the amount of data you got, if any, and certainly not quality/speed (GPRS, EDGE etc.). When they did cotton on the still would never give you a decent amount of data without a ridiculous amount of call minutes and texts. I just wanted the data... but of course data was expensive and broke their money cow of SMS, up to 10p for 160 characters of text, per text!

    The article was interesting but it forgot the absurdity of Apple's nano-SIM... phones got bigger, SIMs got smaller, everyone standardised on the micro-SIM.. except Apple. No good reason.

    1. Steve Todd

      Re: It's all about the data stupid

      Failed your homework there. It's not Apple's Nano SIM, it's part of the GSM standard and there are a number of Android phones that use it also (the Nexus 6 for example).

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: It's all about the data stupid

        Micro and Nano SIMs were pushed through as a standard by Apple.

        1. Steve Todd

          Re: It's all about the data stupid

          Apple were involved in setting the Nano SIM standard, but weren't the only participant. IIRC the solution chosen didn't match Apple's initial suggestion. Oh, and the Micro SIM dates back to 2003, before the first iPhone, so no Apple didn't push that one through either.

    2. sleepy

      Re: It's all about the data stupid

      Apple unsuccessfully pushed hard for a soft SIM system, where carrier airtime contract and SIM customisation can be provisioned over the air. In parallel, they simply reducED the space taken by the SIM.

  10. Ironclad

    Fake History

    Are you out to redress the balance Andrew:?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/09/fake_history_sorry_bbc_but_apple_really_did_invent_the_iphone/

    "silicon moved at a stately pace" - really? I don't remember Moore's law stalling until Apple's iphone came riding to the rescue?

    "Almost every vision of the future made in the past involves a crumby CRT display" - hmm, maybe as 0laf says in cheap TV sets but in the early 80's William Gibson had already envisaged cyberspace as virtual reality.

    Finally I'd argue that the games creators and on-demand content providers have done more to drive display technology and bandwidth improvements than Apple ever did.

    1. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

      Props.. Re: Fake History

      Often, when it comes to films, the limitations of the time make for a less dateable result: On 2001 A Space Odyssey, the production designers Doug Trumbull and Harry Lange couldn't use TV screens to implement the "instrumentation displays" they needed in their spaceship sets. Colour tubes were still very expensive, but more problematically, video tape systems (needed to make sure the same sequences appeared take after take) were horrifically priced.

      So, the only option was to mount cine projectors behind ground-glass screens and project the futuristic instrument readouts onto it. A later scene uses the same trick (and some clever editing) to show Dave Bowman watch a plot-expositionary documentary about his crew on what we would only describe today as "a tablet".

      (Bonus trivia: if you look carefully in Blade Runner, you'll see some of the cine displays from 2001 re-purposed in Deckard's car-- Doug Trumbull worked on both films)

      A decade later, easier access to CRTs and videotape meant that the live displays used in Ridley Scott's "Alien" have actually dated much more poorly. Seeing those curved displays and green text reduces the feeling that this is a setting from future... despite being part of a production that meticulously created a real, lived-in environment (even those "random" symbols on the walls of the Nostromo sets are actually part of a pictographic sign system developed by designer Ron Cobb for the production - see https://wharferj.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/ron-cobbs-alien-semiotic-standards/ ).

      ("Star Wars [Episode IV: A New Hope]" quite cleverly hid its CRT graphics by projecting them or overlaying them on flat surfaces)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Props.. Fake History

        Beat me to it on the 2001 'tablet' :-)

    2. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Fake History

      >"Almost every vision of the future made in the past involves a crumby CRT display" - hmm, maybe as 0laf says in cheap TV sets but in the early 80's William Gibson had already envisaged cyberspace as virtual reality.

      Gibson would back Orlowski up on this: he wrote a story set in the nineties, in which the protagonists keep having flash[sideways?] visions of an alternate world - a vision of 1990 as imagined by the futurists of the 1960s, complete with meal pills. To some extent, the forgettable 2015 movie Tomorrowland plays along similar riffs.

      Still, does it matter? Alien featured CRT monitors, and it still looks better than Lawnmower Man.

    3. Andrew Orlowski (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Fake History

      Are you trying to set the world record for building Straw Men?

      # Straw Man 1:

      >> "silicon moved at a stately pace" - really? I don't remember Moore's law stalling until Apple's iphone came riding to the rescue? <<<

      Mobile microprocessors got better much more quickly after the iPhone.

      # Straw Man 2:

      >> maybe as 0laf says in cheap TV sets but in the early 80's William Gibson had already envisaged cyberspace as virtual reality <<

      Envisaged it in a work of fiction. Fiction writers are good at this sort of thing. You might almost say writing fiction is what fiction writers do best.

  11. J.G.Harston Silver badge

    The best future prediction I've seen, without realising it when I read it 30 years ago, is The Mote In God's Eye. I was re-reading it last week, it's eye-opening.

    "She took out her pocket computer and scribbled a few notes. It hummed as it connected to the ship's computer to fetch the information she requested"

    "They filed into the meeting room, sat down and placed their pocket computers on the table in front of them"

    That's a smart phone. Not just the technology, but the cultural interactions people adopt when they have them.

    1. Lotaresco

      ""She took out her pocket computer and scribbled a few notes. It hummed as it connected to the ship's computer to fetch the information she requested""

      Niven and Pournelle wrote about this in 1974, but the PADD had appeared in the first Star Trek series in 1966.

      At the time, as a nerd keen on building radios, HiFi and various "electronic projects" I can recall snorting with derision at the communicator which was the size of a box of cigarettes and could transmit to geostationary orbit. I cringe when I recall just how cocksure I was that it would never happen. I think that was largely because I'd worked for a month on a walkie-talkie that weighed a couple of kilos and it could barely transmit two miles.

      1. patrickstar

        Uhm, show me the portable device the size of a box of cigarettes that can transmit to geostationary satellites today?

        Closest you'd come is an Inmarsat or Iridium phone, and they are far bulkier than that and the satellites aren't in geosync orbits...

      2. J.G.Harston Silver badge

        What really caused a double-take was "They filed into the meeting room, sat down and placed their pocket computers on the table in front of them". What's the first thing millennial snowflakes do when they go to a restaurant? Put their pocket computer (smartphone) on the table in front of them to keep in touch with the rest of the world - and probably in touch with the others around the table.

        1. sandwich

          Not all youth do this

          Not if it's my lad. The first one to use a phone at a sociable dinner out gets to pay the bill. A great incentive to talk to the people around you not your online 'friends'

  12. jonnycando

    There are always gonna be people in it for themselves....but on the average capitalism is the best way to go....at least that way everyone can be in it for themselves, or not. Choice is good. Steve Jobs did upset the apple cart and focus on the delight of the end user. But he is gone, and likely his vision with him. But as many people as there are in this world, there will be another one along any second...but he might not work for Apple!

  13. Slx

    I don't think this is a fair criticism of GSM at all

    I think this is a grossly unfair criticism of GSM and it's crediting Apple with market smashing innovation it did not have.

    GSM was hugely liberating as it made it possible for the first time for consumers to pick their own hardware and mobile carrier. From day one, it mandated a SIM card which gave the consumer control to bring hardware they owned from network to network without any need to do anything other than swap a smart card.

    Before that you had absolutely lock-in and on US CDMA networks you still do.

    When Apple launched the iPhone first it was incredibly locked to networks, far more water tightly than any other device I've encountered. They're extremely difficult to unofficially unlock and unless you're buying the phone outtight from new you're very much controlled by your network. It's understandable where they subsidise the phone.

    European networks also implemented full number portability long before the US and many other markets and had generally more competition.

    All telcos all over the world had a notion they were going to be content providers and put you in a walled garden of WAP and iMode and so on. That didn't work out as mobiles became capable PCs and an expectation of full open internet access was the norm.

    Apple doesn't generally distribute phones straight to consumers anymore than Nokis did. You could always buy a Nokia or any other phone totally independently of a network but you had to pay full price. The exact same case applied to iPhone from day one. They were when more likely to he networks subsidies and locked because people generally don't like handing over €700 -1000 for a phone and would rather fund it through a carrier subsidy.

    GSM has been a phenomenal set or technical standards that are fully open to use. Networks can a use equipment from multiple vendors. There is no lock in to proprietary standards unlike CDMA One / CDMA 2000 or other single platforms.

    There's been an absolute revolution in technology in the last decade and a half in terms of mobile technology and European driven standards have been at the core or that.

    Nokia's handset division failed because Nokia didn't have the technical ability to develop a useable OS and touch screen environment.

    Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, Alcatel, and others European handset makers along with US players like Motorola, Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu came to the handset business as a development of their telco equipment operations. These companies, especially Nokia, Alcatel, Siemens and especially Ericsson are massive network equipment companies and have been for decades (over a century in the case of Ericsson). They're Europe's Bell Labs counterparts. They had no experience of producing direct consumer products. The provided telephone exchange and their model historically was selling to telcos.

    Meanwhile other entrants like Sony, Philips and Panasonic etc had experience in consumer products especially in audio visual stuff.

    NONE of these organisations were computer companies producing software for consumer and business desktops.

    What happened quite simply was the technology hit a tipping point, a paradigm shift, where the device was a mobile PC, not a phone. So it was inevitable that silicon Valley had a huge huge lead. An iPhone has a lot more in common with a Mac than it does with a telephone.

    That's why Apple and Google dominate. These devices are PCs.

    Just like 1980s and 1990s landline telcos and cable companies didn't make it into online services and interactive TV, mobile telcos soon discovered they're also just dumb pipes and don't really have the v ability to develop the killer apps.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I don't think this is a fair criticism of GSM at all

      "GSM was hugely liberating as it made it possible for the first time for consumers to pick their own hardware and mobile carrier."

      Before GSM there was the analog NMT in Scandinavia and other countries in Europe and outside of it. There were multiple operators, multiple handset manufacturers and it supported roaming. The SIM card made the difference (as your wrote) since before that the phone number was on the eprom and thus possible to spoof.

      1. bep

        Re: I don't think this is a fair criticism of GSM at all

        I also think GSM encouraged competition. Because you could take your phone to another operator and just get a new SIM, you could compare plans, including data plans. The operators might have been reluctant to do it, but they had to compete on data as a result of SIM portability. Because you could get reasonable data plans, it became viable to use bigger screens and download more complex web pages. So it's a bit of chicken and egg in my opinion.

    2. Lars Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: I don't think this is a fair criticism of GSM at all

      @Six. thanks for the comment, it was needed here.

    3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: I don't think this is a fair criticism of GSM at all

      "Nokia's handset division failed because Nokia didn't have the technical ability to develop a useable OS and touch screen environment."

      I thought it was more of a lack of ability to develop several successfully at the same time and a managerial ability to settle on just one.

      1. ScissorHands

        Re: I don't think this is a fair criticism of GSM at all

        No, just a lack of managerial inability for recognizing that all the hard work on the advanced Linux-based devices (the Nokia Internet Tablet line) had finally fused them with very good telephony and they had a winner with the N9.

      2. Loud Speaker

        Re: I don't think this is a fair criticism of GSM at all

        And absolutely nothing to do with the fact that "signed by Symbian" meant that even if you managed to find a useful app, you were unlikely to get it to install properly

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Paperbag vs PureView

    Making Nokia phone could take years but it was worth it. Hell, I'm a south Asian and I still sometimes see a person running a Symbian smartphones released decade ago? It is guaranteed that every mobile account recharge outlates of my country contains 1/2 Nokia 1100/1110. These phones are surviving that amount of torture since their release over a decade ago. In past Nokia, Sony, Motorola, Samsung everyone made good quality hardware, but Nokia was almost always ahead by innovations and ease of use(Sony was first better at Camera but Nokia cached-up soon). Now everything is better but hardware quality gotten worse. Nokia phones had many features it's south-Asian and African users didn't even know. It was also uncommonly honest about specifications. It used to give users full right on their device which money-hog bloody businessman Jobs never did. In our south asia, it's the Cheap Chinese feature phones that striked Nokia first. Then very cheap Chinese Androids killed it. But when it's dying it was still selling most phones than any other company. We won't probably see any other mobile company which got a big division just for making ringtones. However now old Nokia is gone, Samsung and Sony got adopted and traded quality for price. It's been over a year Foxcon is making Nokia named phones which is actually just another smartphone of the market.

    Old-Nokia Fanboy

    1. Slx

      Re: Paperbag vs PureView

      I don't really agree that the hardware's become worse - Rather that the focus is now entirely on smartphones, so any feature phones that are available very, very cheap and basic. 10+ years ago those were the mainstay of the mobile phone companies' business and they poured resources into designing and building them.

    2. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

      Re: Paperbag vs PureView

      Last week, I got a customer-support email from someone regarding my most popular Symbian app.

      Personally, I only retired my N8 in 2014, and it remains the phone I've owned for the longest period of time (I got my first GSM handset in 1997).

  15. stu 4

    what the hell's it got to do with Europe ?

    exactly the same protect-ist racket was in force in the USA - hell even more so - they were lucky if they got SMS in there crappy flip phones.

    So though I agree with the general gist, it does seem to be a chance for Andrew 'Brexit' Orlowski to try to blame the EU for something which is FA to do with it.

    1. Slx

      Re: what the hell's it got to do with Europe ?

      I'm very confused as to how you can compare "European GSM" to Apple. Apple is a device maker and software company. GSM is a set of largely open industry standards (3GPP) covering GSM 2G, UMTS (3G), LTE and a whole load of supporting and associated technologies and protocols. The GSM Association is simply an industry body.

      Apple's phones are running on GSM standards for communication - GSM 2G, UMTS, LTE etc.

      It's a bit like trying to compare Samsung to the IP and the ISOC.

      GSM made it possible for open standards that have made handset development a hell of a lot easier. Had it not been for GSM and its associated standards, you'd have a kludge of proprietary commercial networks like CDMA-One in the USA which would have required non-standard chipsets, special licensing, custom handsets etc etc.

      GSM threw the door open to a plethora of equipment manufacturers, handset makers (including Apple and all the Android makers) and umpteen telcos that were able to roll out networks far more readily than they would have been with locked-down standards.

      Before GSM, you basically had to approach someone like Motorola and buy a complete network and were locked into a particular system on their terms.

      Incidentally, GSM spun out of a European Union project which was aimed at smashing down the barriers between mobile networks in the 1980s and creating some kind of a framework for pan-European (and beyond) mobile services. It achieved that by creating an open standard and getting players to corporate. Before GSM there were just islands of proprietary analog systems in different European countries, roaming was impossible, there was no obvious path to data services etc etc.

      Incidentally, Nokia hasn't gone anywhere. Its handset division failed and disappeared but the company itself is still one of the key players behind mobile and fixed line infrastructure and has acquired Siemens networking division and also the enormous Alcatel-Lucent which included Bell Labs and all of Alcatel's gear and patents.

      It's very likely that your mobile handset, home phone in your house or your internet traffic is traversing Nokia or Ericsson networking equipment.

      1. Andrew Orlowski (Written by Reg staff)

        Fake News. So sad.

        "Incidentally, GSM spun out of a European Union project"

        No it didn't.

        The EU didn't exist until a decade after work on GSM started. It happened anyway, without the huge bureaucrat overhead, through non-EU bodies like CEPT. And because of the multilateral agreement between four trade Ministers who endorsed the work. That's all you need to get the ball rolling.

        GSM is a great example of how great things can happen without a massive bureaucrat superstate issuing top-down decrees, and generally getting in the way.

        http://www.gsmhistory.com/who_created-gsm/

        But I suppose that since it has so few successes of its own, the EU wants to take credit for other people's successes.

  16. DerekCurrie
    Angel

    So, Can I Blame AT&T For...?

    After watching the rather uncanny AT&T video of 'The Future' as of 1993, I got the feeling that perhaps our actual future has been aping what AT&T thought should happen.

    Therefore, can I blame AT&T for:

    • The terrible idea of transparent computer screens?

    • Butt-ugly, geometrically boring architecture?

    • The continued rise of those with profound insecurity accompanied by the bombastic overcompensation of their ego in positions of power?

    Still missing: The ability to translate with any decent quality from one language to another. That would be enough. But it would be nice to add on the ability to sample the source voice and provide live translation in using the sound quality of that source voice. I'm not holding my breath for that one.

    1. gnasher729 Silver badge

      Re: So, Can I Blame AT&T For...?

      "Still missing: The ability to translate with any decent quality from one language to another. That would be enough. But it would be nice to add on the ability to sample the source voice and provide live translation in using the sound quality of that source voice. I'm not holding my breath for that one."

      Not just from one language to another. Take British dialects; some are hard to understand for some people. Something that can translate a strong Scottish accent into English that I can understand would be great. And if software became better than my ears, you could translate drunken English to sober English, or English with a running nose into English spoken by a healthy person.

      1. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

        Re: So, Can I Blame AT&T For...?

        "A strong Scottish accent" is actually something that may or may not be the closest living language to English or its most distant living dialect, depending on which linguist you ask. It's called Scots, and the only thing people do agree on is that it's not a "strong accent".

        The reason you have difficulty in understanding it is that it follows almost -but not quite- all of the grammatical rules of English, and uses a vocabularly of words that sound almost -but not quite- the same as English ones, but the commonly used words are those that are most different from English. Sometimes this is because English has diverged from an older pattern that Scots still follows (e.g., English is "go/went"; Scots is "gae/gaed" or "go/goed").

        Many people who do speak Scots don't consider it to be a different language to English, and so they "code-switch" regularly between Scottish English and Scots just to add to the confusion.

  17. mike panero

    More about the ipod

    It was all about the ipodness of it (the ipod touch came out in september that year, a few years ahead of the ipad)

    You may recall some people carrying wifi GSM doongles so they could use their ipod touch in the field

    And early iphones are for those blessed with young eyes, this old windbag needs at least 5" to use the web

    Case-sensitive passwords are a joy on an iphone keyboard

    Remember when music was the food of love?

    What happens if you play on?

    It grows bigger and you can't stop playing with it?

    Or you have children and have to be an adult

  18. goldcd

    I loathe Apple BUT

    I loathe telcos more.

    Bestest thing Apple ever did for all of us, was firmly put telcos in their place as the big dumb pipes they screamed at us they weren't.

    Alright, Apple stood on the shoulders of GSM, but they took that ball and ran with it.

    1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

      Re: I loathe Apple BUT

      "Alright, Apple stood on the shoulders of GSM, but they took that ball and ran with it."

      GSM is just a standard.

      Apple would have adopted whatever standard was in use at the time.

      I really don't get what GSM has to do with this?

      If apple made radios, they would have made them so they would receive FM and AM, becase those are the standard bands and modulations.

  19. Timo

    did much the same in the US

    Apple came in and broke the grip of the US operators. Before the iPhone we were stuck with lousy choices for phones. Verizon was too arrogant to allow another company to speak to their captive customers. AT&T was starving for an advantage, and put themselves at the mercy of Apple. AT&T had a couple boom years of exclusivity while Verizon got to eat crow.

    Same thing happened in Japan. Softbank deployed world spec networks and then the iPhone. Everyone in the telecom world said that it would never work, Japanese required custom products,etc. After only a year or so Softbank had picked up huge market share.

    1. imaginarynumber

      Re: did much the same in the US

      Contrary to the tone of the article. Here in the UK, if you go to someone like the CarPhone Warehouse and purchase a handset, more often than not, it will network independent, even if you purchased it as a contract phone. The iPhone will lock itself to the first SIM card that is inserted.

      Yeah, Apple really stuck two fingers up to the networks.

      And how long did it take apple to allow the iPhone to tether?

      I had tethering back in 2002- on a Nokia

      1. sleepy

        Re: did much the same in the US

        Apple didn't tether because they were demanding uncapped data with acceptable bandwidth at a fixed affordable price as a condition of allowing a carrier to sell locked iPhones. Keeping tethering off the iPhone was part of Apple's side of the deal as they drove the carriers into the future.

        Nokia was a typical gadget engineering company designing the gadget only, instead of the entire customer experience.

        There are reasons why Apple is rarely the one introducing technical features first, but often the one that achieves mainstream adoption. Mobile internet, paid music downloads, WiFi, USB etc.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    3D has flopped,

    60+ million 3DS sales says not really, but VR is the successor.

    1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

      3DS?

      The kids (son and his friends) I see using them have usually turned off 3D completely..

      1. MK_E

        The only reason any of my family have got the 3DS is because for some godforsaken reason the 2DS was designed with that giant slab form factor that can't be closed and doesn't fit in a pocket. Nothing to do with the 3D.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If we're living under consumer capitalism...

    Not for much longer bourgies.

  22. myithingwontcharge

    The networks pushed themselves into irrelivence

    I always remember back in 2003, spending hundreds of pounds on one of Three's "amazing" new NEC 3G phones which had been advertised as having amazing data speeds and video capabilities..... then when I got it home having a major WTF moment when I realised the Three network (back then) didn't support ANY internet access whatsoever at any price (the other four 2G networks at the time already all supported (rather expensive) GPRS and dialup internet access)!

    That a new entrant like Three, launching with a new technology (3G) that had been massively promoted in the press as a new era for data (and by definition Internet access), could launch with such a broken product speaks volumes of the contempt some people in the industry had for their customers (it seems Three were attempting to sell premium downloaded videos including I believe even porn and appear to have decided not to offer any internet access as a business decision to trap their customers in a "walled garden"). None of the other networks made that mistake and Three was regarded as a joke for nearly a decade because of it.

    Since then Three have turned their marketing on it's head and now claim to be the network for internet, however when ever I see one of their adverts that's the first thing that springs to mind.

    BTW I am a current Three customer. I joined them when they were the first to offer "unlimited" data, which was also the point they started to turn around their reputation.... however if they don't get their 4G act together soon they may regain it.

    1. The Sod Particle

      Re: The networks pushed themselves into irrelivence

      if I recall correctly, Three doesn't and never has supported anything other than 3G networks, hence the name. When out of range of one of its 3G towers your phone would connect to another provider, I forget which one, for telephony purposes over 2G. Crucially this arrangement did not apply to data which could only travel over Three's own network. This worked transparently to (for?) the user. You probably lived in a 3G/Three notspot as they are now known.

      addendum:

      At the time providers didn't provide coverage maps so caveat emptor!

  23. smartypants

    Orac

    In some respects, the british shows about the future are just still a little ahead of their time.

    Right now you can buy these digital assistants like Alexa, or they're built into the OS of the computer you're using, but their big flaw is that they aren't cynical enough, and don't generally come across as being a lot more brainy than you are, and that perhaps they went to a better type of school.

    If they can sort that out, then I might start using them!

    (And what about some nice flashing lights...)

  24. imaginarynumber

    Orlowski- have you been possessed by Charles Arthur?

    I recall him writing a similar article when he was the Vicar and Defender of the Faith at the Guardian.

    He too tried to argue that the iphone was a democratising force for good. And he too decided to overlook the contribution of the likes of Windows Mobile and Palm. I guess that it is difficult to acknowledge their existence when trying to argue that the iPhone was unique and super high spec.

    The uncomfortable truth was that it wasn't as simple as the iPhone Vs WAP devices. Windows Mobile never even had a WAP browser, it shipped with Internet Explorer and by the time the iphone was released, there were 5" phones with Opera's tabbed HTML browser and much higher specifications than the iphone. HTC had already developed TouchFlo which allowed users to scroll, tap and swipe with their fingers.

    We are asked to believe that the Telcos didn't want people using data greedy devices but here in the UK, O2 offered the XDA range, Orange the SPV and T-Mobile the MDA.. 4 months before the iPhone was released T-Mobile offered the 5" T-Mobile Ameo for £118 on a £45pm contract that included unlimited 3G access (with tethering). IIRC the only firm that didn't offer unlimited access was O2 who introduced their service in Oct 2007.

    However within a couple of years, about the same time as the iphone was becoming popular, all of the networks (bar 3) dropped unlimited access.I, for one, could now no longer stream Hulu (Flash) to my phone with impunity.

    I get that you like the iPhone but please stop with the revisionism.

  25. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "Today you can walk into a mall in Shenzhen, and half an hour later you are a phone OEM."

    Or a front for a Chinese S/W company that wants to own your customers?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/15/android_phoning_home_to_china/

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/20/more_androids_carry_phonehome_firmware/

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Alternative Facts Ride Again

    While I enjoy a good rant as much as the next person, this article tries to string together a whole load of things that simply don't fit. GSM does not equal mobile phone handset manufacturing. And sci-fi has three tenths of stuff all to do with the matter.

  27. sleepy

    Apple's real cleverness

    It isn't, and wasn't just about the gadget, although intuitive UI and full desktop browser were important. The cleverest thing Mr Jobs did was to leverage the competition that governments had imposed on carrier licensees to (a) force flat rate, affordable data charging and (b) take over the customer relationship with the hated carrier (turning carrier into mere data pipe).

    By the time of iPhone, the only way a carrier could get new subscribers was by taking them from competitors. For a pocket network computer to be successful needed unlimited data at an affordable price. That was the only way users would not be paranoid about cost implications of any action (those were the days of mobile internet users getting a completely unexpected astronomical airtime bill.)

    The exclusive carrier deal delivered the end user a revolutionary device, with the first unmetered affordable data plan and a customer relationship with trusted Apple instead of hated carrier. The reason Apple could force this bitter pill down the throat of a carrier was because it offered a way to steal subscribers from other carriers. If it worked, the carrier had a monopolistic advantage over competitors for maybe 4 years (Google's Android engineers knew as soon as Jobs showed the iPhone that they needed to go back to the drawing board). If it didn't, the bitter iphone pill hadn't changed the market, and nothing was lost. It did work, and thus Apple opened the door allowing Android et al to slip in behind them, creating the smartphone economy of today.

  28. Daedalus

    The double-down

    A guy once wrote an interesting article about how the motorcycle industry got disrupted. US bikes faced competition from UK bikes with better tech. What did they do? They doubled down on their existing tech and lost.

    Later UK bikes had the same situation with respect to Japanese bikes. Same tactic: ignore the new tech and double down on the old. Losers!

    Then UK cars and so many other old line companies. And GSM, apparently. "We don't need no stinking useful tech!".

    Oh, and what was the response of the EU bureaucrats to the threat and later fact of Brexit? They said "maybe we should have gone for unity faster". Doubling down on what wasn't working.

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