It's the iPhone's 10th b'day or, as El Reg calls it, 'BILL RAY DAY' A decade ago to the day, the Jesus Mobe went on sale in the US: bereft of 3G connectivity, the iPhone had a relatively crappy two megapixel camera and 4GB of storage, not to mention a hefty price of $499. It was destined to be a failure. Apple was going to combine the functionality of the iPod with a mobile phone, Bill Ray, El …
The following link is an excerpt from a book about the origins of the iPhone. What one takes away is that though a capacitive screened phone with no buttons seems obvious in retrospect, it wasn't at the time. This excerpt covers the time up to Jobs going with the concept, after an internal competition (the other concept was an iPod with phone... yeah, entering numbers on a jog dial is no fun). Also, some of the iPhone UI concepts had been developed by an Apple team researching a tablet device known as Q79 in the early 2000s.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/13/15782200/one-device-secret-history-iphone-brian-merchant-book-excerpt
Without the iPhone, Microsoft would have ended up being the second competitor in the smartphone world. No doubt once they had a foothold they'd have played their typical anti-competitive games to damage Android and probably locked it out of the corporate world entirely, plus they'd compete across the whole price range instead of just at the high end like Apple.
No way Android would have anything like the market share it has today against that combination.
What do mean by format? Copied from whom?
Nothing is completely new, but making good combinations and making the right compromises - and then polishing the result - are skills in their own right.
LG made a bit of a noise at the time, because they announced a capacitive touch screen phone before the iPhone was announced, but there's no doubt the iPhone was in late development before the LG Prada was made public. What's interesting is that both phones made the same decision to omit 3G in order to preserve battery life (presumably to make up for the large screen's power consumption) - an example that if you give different engineers the same constraints they may well make similar decisions.
The difference of philosophy was that the LG was not trying to be anything more than a stylish feature phone. The iPhone came from a computer company, and thus in it elements that had been developed for other projects... and perhaps a sense amongst its developers that it would be the start of a different way of interacting with computers.
Interesting that his profile at Gartner lists his time at El Reg as
"Situation Publishing, Wireless Correspondent, 8 years"
Yes, I know SitPub is parent of The Register but it's notable he didn't name Vulture central directly. Was he worried people may link him to his iPhone prediction of yesteryear?
As Mr. Ray himself wrote about his iPhone prediction: "I'd hate to be remembered for that one article when I've made so many bigger mistakes than that."
The original iphone was crap .....
S60 was out of date and no touchscreen variants at that time
S40 was out of date and also no use for smartphones
S80 was perfect for this sort of thing (Nokia communicator) but got left to die due to lack of development and the high price of the communicator series, which were always way out of spec by the time they hit the shelves.
Symbian UIQ2 was very good but got quickly buried for UIQ3 which was terrible and slow due to lack of RAM on the handsets.
Windows mobile 5/6 was windows mobile. Nuff said.
It's not that Apple did anything brilliant (apart from the intuitive UI which won customers over).... it's just that everything else was pretty much shit. The app store again helped as Nokia Ovi charging $30 for apps was never going to be a winner.
In celebration I dug out my N95 8gb today, beautiful phone and great sound, but it's still bloody awful to use.
Apple knew that most people didn't give a shit about the hardware's capabilities, they wanted something that was easy to use. "Easy to use" is not how 98% of the population would describe any previous attempts at a smartphone. WAP? Seriously...who came up with that pile of shit?? Downloading apps via the IR port??
This is still true today, despite a decade of whining from Apple haters about non-removable batteries, lack of SD card and picking and choosing specs where the iPhone is lacking compared to their pet favorite.
This is still true today, despite a decade of whining from Apple haters about non-removable batteries, lack of SD card and picking and choosing specs where the iPhone is lacking compared to their pet favorite.
And yes they still moan and wail. You forgot to add to the list...
"Walled Garden"
"Apple spyware"
"Lack of a headphone port"
"Sideloading"
"Not Open Source"
"To do anything, I have to root it..."
"Cost, cost, cost"
"Planned obsolescence"
etc
etc
Apple gave millions of people a device that opened up true mobile computing for the masses on the move. They have made a shed load of money from this and a lot of people don't like this. Personally, I have an iPhone (secondhand iPhone 6) because it does what it says on the tin. That is all I need from a device.
At the time of the iPhone's release, most phones from Sony Ericsson, Nokia, LG and Samsung had proprietary headset sockets, which often varied from model to model within a single brand.
Since I've never owned an iPhone it doesn't bother me that they've ditched the 3.5mm jack, but I'm glad they showed other phone makers how to it properly over the last ten years.
Easy to use was exactly why the Senior HR woman at the company I was IT Support at absolutely had to have one.
We supplied Blackberrys to the Executives at the time and she could never wrap her head around using it. (She was from HR).
The other Blackberry users sneered for a while, but pretty soon most of them decided they had to have one too.
I did have one fanatical Windows phone user (some sort of HP device) who would not change despite his phone only working properly about 3 days out of 5.
but not so much that I'd pay $1300 for a 10 page Gartner report where Bill is a co-author.
The subject, by the way, is "smart streetlights".
Anyone with $1300 to burn to help keep Bill in employment rather than in the dark, see
https://www.gartner.com/doc/3748517?ref=AnalystProfile&srcId=1-4554397745
Wow. it's true, $1300.
I would hope that the people involved in city infrastructure would be suitably qualified and knowledgeable in matters pertaining to their remit and not give one shit or cent to Gartner for their 'insight'.
/rant
"I would hope that the people involved in city infrastructure would be suitably qualified and knowledgeable in matters pertaining to their remit and not give one shit or cent to Gartner for their 'insight'."
In my experience, the people involved in city infrastructure are suitable qualified and know what's what. As long as we are talking about the guys that do the actual work. They don't buy reports like this; a) because they don't really need them and b) they wouldn't get approval for the expenditure anyway.
However, the level that makes the big decisions and approves budgets etc. will buy reports like this - and read about half of the executive summary and comprehend a quarter of it at best. Which will unfailingly be about something that has little to do with the needs and capabilities of the actual city infrastructure in question.
I put my $1,300 down, read the report and here's a summary:
1. Smart streetlamps should illuminate the street but not dazzle people. The shade should direct the light downwards, not upwards.
2. Smart streetlamps should not flash or flicker, or explode.
3. Smart streetlamps should operate silently - for instance mimicking the sound of screaming or gunshot is not smart.
4. Smart streetlamps should always be installed in the vacinity of an actual street, and not, for example, in the middle of a field or in the sea. Smart streetlamps should not be installed on moving objects (e.g. cows), unless permission has been sought first and the necessary additional length of cable is supplied.
5. Smart streetlamps should attempt to switch off during the hours of daylight.
6. Smart streetlamps should be priced smartly. The smart price is simply the dumb price * 19.7.
It's another winner from Gartner.
Perhaps with OTHER smart phones you paid per Mbyte or per second and with an iPhone ordinary consumers could afford the data, subsidised by ALL the voice customers, which was either a large cap or all you could eat (fair usage in fine print).
That more than bought in Fingerworks GUI and Samsung SC6400 ARM was what made it a success. Plus Jobs' reality distortion field.
Nokia had lost the plot 3 years earlier, but even if they hadn't the "traditional" billing was strangling smart phone use. I know, as I had one from early 2002 and only it was paid by the company, I couldn't have afforded the data.
Fingerworks made a multitouch keyboard, not a Graphical User Interface - a HID is linked to a GUI (just as we associate a mouse with icons and menus) but they are not the same thing. Parts of the iPhone GUI came from a small team in Apple who had been looking at a tablet computer concept. This tablet didn't progress too far because it would have been too expensive to market with the technology of the time.
The 'Jobs Reality Distortion Field' was a term coined to describe the pressure he would put on engineers to do in a week what they'd estimated would take a month - and yep, that was in full effect during the development of the iPhone. Staff were recruited from other Apple departments with the offer 'We want you for a project. We can't tell you what it is. If you accept, you will have next to zero free time for the next eighteen months'. The development of the iPhone resulted in a few divorces, apparently.
I remember seeing one for the first time. The only instruction needed was "press the home key"; everything else was so blindingly obvious and natural.
Compare that with those awful Symbian and MS Phone interfaces of the time. Zooming pictures - no. Simple internet access with autozoom - no. Simple to use menu interface - no.
True innovation from Apple.
Where's the subsequent innovation Apple? Lost your mojo have you? The iPad interface is fundamentally a big iPhone, so incremental. The watch.. just can't get past the fugly looks. Apple TV, nope. Macs, not a lot of innovation -- that touch bar isn't innovative as it's just a modified touch screen.
I remember reading a Stephen J Gould essay about the pace of evolution. He made the point that creatures didn't evolve at a steady rate, but rather adapt (or die out) rapidly in response to a changing environment, and then often appear to remain in much the same form for a long time.
When the iPod was released, flash memory was expensive and so a small HDD was the way to go - and similar form factors quickly followed from Creative and iRiver using the same Toshiba HDD. The iPod satisfied a clear valley in the fitness landscape - cassette Walkmans were too clunky, portable CD players were too big, MiniDisc wasn't too entrenched and carrying another half dozen albums doubled the space it took up in your coat pocket.
The Mac Touchbar is limited, but we are about to enter a transitional period in Human Interfaces: machine vision blurring the divide between being in the workshop and being at the desk. As a CAD user, I don't use Macs, but am interested in Google's Project Tango (specialist hardware) and Apple's ARkit (software and soon to be specialist silicon, reading between the lines), Hololens (more sensors, more silicon), and Intel and nVidia's efforts. More modest 3D space-sensing HIDs such as Leap Motion haven't made much of a dent ( had no coverage here at The Reg), but then touch screen PCs (WinXP Tablet Edition, specialist gear from Wacom and Cintiq) were around for years before being refined into more mass market devices.
Apple's refinement over the last ten years is harder to see because everyone else has upped their game (heck, Microsoft's hardware efforts might not be to your taste, but at least they are not just doing yet another 16:9 laptop). That's something to be glad about.
Currently, the buzzword areas are home automation, autonomous driving and AR/VR... there are no clear winners yet (and Apple are unlikely to aim at the mass market anyway, preferring a smaller high margin segment), but who knows?
For all we know, a university spin-out company might create some magic battery technology next year, and all sorts of currently impractical form factors and applications suddenly become feasible (eg a useful smart watch with no compromises over a normal Casio watch)
> Without the Android, iPhone would not be where it is today and vice-versa
True, iOS is probably better today for having had competition, but that competition could have come from a few places other than Android (Maemo, Meego, PalmOS, BB10, some weird Samsung stuff, some sort of Windows, Ubuntu, Firefox)
Two major hurdles to all iPhones: cost (obviously) and iTunes.
Insisting that anything uploaded to the phone has to go via the worst piece of commercial software I've ever encountered is a major no-no.
I struggled install my own ringtones (essential as the iPhone's default ones are too quiet to be audible on an urban street). Being unable to easily upload documents and pics stopped me using iPhone as a mobile office, something I'd been able to do with a Symbian Nokia E71 in 2011.
Some relief to go from iPhone to Android on an aged Samsung G4 (had the unique price advantage of being found in a dumpster, so just cost £7 for a fresh battery).
To be fair, the iPhones 4 and 4S I used were 100% reliable. In common with friends, I've found Android very occasionally falls over.
Sorry. Nope. I've used iTunes. It's awful. But I've also used Microsoft's Zune software that came with the Windows Phone 7. Which was both worse than iTunes and designed by a cluster of colourblind hedgehogs in a bag. On acid.
But both were brilliant pieces of software perfection compared to Sony's music management program at the time. MusicForge? It was the only way to get data onto their Walkmen (Walkpersons?) - and was rather like iTunes, only it was impossible to install, took 3 minutes to start, then crashed 50% of the time - and repeatedly failed to complete synching. It wasn't as hateful to look at as Microsoft's though.
MusicForge? It was the only way to get data onto their Walkmen (Walkpersons?) - and was rather like iTunes
I think it was called MusicMatch. It used an Access database back end and so (once you had hit your '3 copies only on your minidisks', all you had to do was either fire up Access and adjust accordingly or, if you had the time to spare, delete the database completelt and let the software scan for music again..
Utterly useless. Typical Sony software - look impressive but fail at everything else.
Insisting that anything uploaded to the phone has to go via the worst piece of commercial software I've ever encountered is a major no-no.
This is true. On my shiny new macos-running[1] MBP 2016[2], iTunes *still* shows me the spinning beach ball when in shuffle mode on my (not huge - 100GB) music library (which is all local).
Really? The fastest MacOS machines then available, still brought to it's knees by an application?
Apple - I really, really like a lot of what you do (especially MacOS). But please - take iTunes out the back for a quiet chat and then come back in alone..
[1] No dual-boot for me - my old bootcamp Windows setup got migrated to a VM courtesy of Parallels. And it's *still* quicker than running it native on my old MBP.
[2] And lets not get into iTunes on Windows - a Pure Storm of Fail..
It does seem that phone connectivity or music sync software attracts the most incompetent and inept developers... however as for iTunes being the "worst", I raise you Samsung Kies. Randomly fails to connect to devices that it registered moments earlier, is entirely unsure of what it is actually meant to do and even less sure of how it would like to present this clusterfuck to the unlucky user. That's if it installed successfully or even started up...
Phones were terrible clunky things before the iPhone came along and showed not only how a UI should be done, but how the phone should look, and how the phone should be supported. Whoever heard of software updates before the iPhone? Before Apple, who'd managed a decent virtual keyboard, inertia scrolling, smooth UI transitions, decent screen refreshing at 60fps, the list goes on... Ten years on and the Android ecosystem still hasn't completely worked all this out.
Before Apple, the only two companies that with hindsight really did anything clever and usable in the portable computing space were Psion (sorely missed) and US Robotics/Palm (less so). Once I saw the first iPhone in operation, I realised three things:
1. I had to own an iPhone. It was so much better than anything else around. Sure it omitted stuff that others supplied, but at the time these were good and clever tradeoffs. I've never had any other kind of phone since. Why would I?
2. Windows CE - the incumbent smartphone platform of the day - was clunky, slow, ugly and doomed. It was astonishing how wrong Microsoft was then, and how wrong they have continued to be since.
3. The 'walled garden', so regularly moaned about, was just what 95% of people - me included - wanted in a phone.
You can write all you like about what Apple copied, didn't invent, bought in, whatever. But the truth is this: only the Jobs era Apple could've come up with something that truly deserved the word 'disruptive', and only Apple did. So happy 10th Birthday, iPhone, and I really hope that Cook, Ive and co can come up with something worthy for the iPhone this year.
I had a Sony Ericsson P800 back in 2003. That had software updates - admittedly downloaded via a computer, but then I think the original iPhone did its updates over iTunes too.
That had a virtual keyboard, which you could use if you had small fingers. Or with a stylus. The touch screen wasn't great, but was good enough for navigation with fingers. Obviously at the time the tech wasn't there to make the phone bigger.
But in my opinion a stylus is still a quicker, and less frustrating, method of text entry than an onscreen keyboard. For a sentence, it's fine, for a paragraph it becomes very annoying, and far inferior to handwriting recognition.
You could also buy apps for Symbian, though because of the bollocks with having more than one flavour, the ones I wanted were never available for UIQ. So the walled garden would have been better.
I agree that the capacitative screens were a great advance, and Apple came into the market at the right time with the right tech. But, I don't think the way they pushed the development of the industry has been for the best. Far too often their phone design is looks over functional, for example putting glass anywhere on the phone but the screen was an utterly pisspoorly thought out stupid dunderheaded piece of childish idiocy. That should have been stopped at source.
Also they were one of the first companies pushing the stupid design decision of not protecting the expensive and fragile screens with a bezel. Sure it may look prettier, but deliberately designing a product to be so fragile that it requires a case to be useful is also a stupid decision.
You're right that they were better than Symbian and Windows CE. And both Nokia and MS had lost the plot on mobile at this point. But I'm not sure that Blackberry deserved their fate.
Buttons are so much more ergonomic than screens. I'd love to see some innovation in phone design, but this seems to have stopped. Touch screens are good, but so are other input methods. Haptic feedback only goes so far, and for the most important function of a phone (being making and receiving phonecalls) modern smartphones have many faults. If only someone could make something like the Motorola RAZR that could do email satnav and a few apps.
The iPhone was the kick up the arse the market needed at the time. And did that job brilliantly. I'm not sure now that Apple aren't as complacent as everyone else in the market now. Is it a general fault of the mobile industry?
Steve Jobs liked the Motorola RAZR, hence the Motorola ROKR with iTunes (which Jobs hated having to present on stage).
I have no problems with phones requiring cases - the user can choose a case to fit their environment, just as we choose our clothes before leaving the house. Where it gets annoying is when chooses a waterproof Sony phone, buys the official case, and still wrecks the screen because the case didn't protect one edge of the phone (and its bezels are ABS and not aluminium).
There's currently a Kickstarter campaign for a Psion-style keyboard for the modular Moto phones... seeming a good implementation of a modular concept, with only its proprietary nature giving cause for concern.
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