ZDNet:
What surprises me isn’t how popular the iPhone is now, but that it survived the first couple of years to become the influential cash-generating machine that it has become.
I’m just going to come out and say it — the original iPhone was junk. I know, that’s a scandalous thing to say, but to say otherwise is to do a disservice to the memories of the awesome handsets of the time. Call quality was terrible, it didn’t support multimedia messaging, and data speeds were slow even for 2007 because Apple chose not to support 3G.
I would usually say pieces like this are revisionism but the author, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, is someone whose writing I know and like and, upon reading it, you remember just how limited the original iPhone was. But his reasonings for why it eventually succeeded are sound.
Nonsense, limited or not the original iPhone was so clearly better than anything on the market. It was not available here and I purchase it from the US, I then had to wait to get this special SIM card and jailbreak it just to use it. Before I could start using it I would start it up and just play with the “slide to unlock” and man was that cool.
Ultimately though, you can pick at things like the lack of 3G or MMS to make a case but it was pretty obvious that those things were minor and would be coming in subsequent updates.
To call it “junk” you need your head examined. There is a reason why goliaths like Nokia and Blackberry are more or less extinct today. What the iPhone lacked on day one Apple could easily arrive at. What the competition lacked that the iPhone had was not so easily reached.
Take the glasses off, the author is a nincompoop who still doesn’t get it.
Junk? What does that say about the device I traded in for the iPhone? Let’s not forget that voice quality sucked on those too. Data bandwidth didn’t matter because the interface was so horrific that I avoided using the internet. I honestly rarely even texted because it was so hard to type on those stupid phones. I don’t care what anyone says, the iPhone was killer compared to the phones I had.
Here’s a summary of the article: The first iPhone was terrible. Other than the “excellent design.” And the “quality of the screen.” And the browser which “was a total game changer.”
My own anecdotal experience is that many phones could only view WAP websites at that point, which were worthless, whereas the iPhone could view actual websites. I could now use the phone while on location working tech to get information about how to configure something, or to look on a web site to see if something was in stock or to click a phone number to call, and to get directions using the Maps app to clients or stores. Those tasks were either painful or impossible depending which Windows CE, Palm, or Blackberry phone you had.
Phones with T9 text input bordered on torture. I tried that on one phone once, and never texted again until I got the iPhone.
The iPhone didn’t work for various specific use cases for the first few iterations. It made sense back then for people with specific use cases to wait out the first couple or few releases. That doesn’t mean that the phone was junk, it means that at that point it didn’t work for that person.
Yeah, the linked article starts out with bait, then switches. Annoying trick.
I visited some friends in LA that August and clearly remember when I was blown away by the iPhone. We were driving somewhere and saw a really oddly named business ( I don’t remember what it was)… so one of the people with the new iPhone pulled it out, looked up the name and we knew. Now? That’s trivial. But in 2007 to be able to pull up a website on a phone while driving down the street and to actually get a readable version of the site? Blown. Away.
Did I know it would change the world to the degree it has? Of course not. Did I know it was incredibly cool and want one? Hell yes.
I didn’t have the original iPhone because it wasn’t available in Canada, but I think this is nonsense.
• My experience with MMS was always that it would never go through, so it was more of an anti-feature than a feature. (This is still my assumption, though I imagine it’s been working reliably for years now.)
• 3G wasn’t much of an issue because the iPhone would actually switch to WiFi when it was available without stepping through menus.
• No comment on call quality of the original iPhone, except that this was already a complaint I heard daily. It was also something I heard about my iPhone 3GS… and a complaint that went away when I moved that iPhone 3GS to a new network.
I was watching the original announcement last week. The audience seemed appreciative, but what really seemed to blow them away was the momentum scrolling. That was when they gasped.
I try to imagine an iPhone without that feature, and I just can’t.
Truly nailing something is not just the broad strokes but the details. 🙂
“but to say otherwise is to do a disservice to the memories of the awesome handsets of the time”
Aside from being knee-slapping funny, it’s just not true.
Ah, memories.
“Call quality was terrible, it didn’t support multimedia messaging, and data speeds were slow even for 2007 because Apple chose not to support 3G.”
and then Apple upgraded the iPhone and sales went through the roof. Upgrade after upgrade and sales still skyrocketed. Wow, I guess that is a tough concept.
Honestly I think that if a quality Android phone had been out within a year of the iPhone or if something comparable to the iPhone had been on the market already we’d live in a very different world. But the iPhone utterly changed things – not only was it a full screen UI but as you say, the details WORKED. The thing was such a huge step forward over what was then around that issues like no cut/copy/paste were allowed to be minor annoyances vs deal breakers.
Had Apple dithered over an App Store they might have killed the iPhone… but having that out the next year with the 3G was the turning point. Not only did they show with the 2nd iteration of the iPhone that they were moving forward, but now you could get APPs. On a PHONE. Thinkabout it, the cliche ‘there’s an app for that’ came about because they were responsive enough to realize that letting developers have an SDK and develop apps was the right move.
Reminds me of an old joke.
Q: What is WAP?
A: The sound the phone makes when you throw it in the garbage.
And dial up internet was extremely slow. But not compared to being offline.
Shawn, your current respect for Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is charming, considering the sorts of things I recall he habitually wrote about Apple, both before the iPhone’s release, and afterwards.
Far as I’m concerned, he’s one of those lickspittles I put in the holding pen alongside such tech oracles as Rob Enderle, John Dvorak, George Ou, Mike Elgan, Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley, Joe Wilcox, Dan Lyons, Brian Lam, and Troy Wolverton. Considering the volume of misinformation these people disseminated under the guise of tech analysis, they can all go redact themselves.
Same here. Not for that guy. I still remember him from that time.
Yup. These two quotes reveal at least that much. Especially the first, the awesome handsets of the time? What reality or multiverse was (is?) this guy in?
I think this “article” was penned not as a compliment to Apple but as a self serving device. “See? See how much we got right?” Please ignore everything thereafter, thanks.
They can go to hell. Too much?
Agreed. I had one. It was an astonishing device. I didn’t miss 3G because before the iPhone, internet browsers on phones were ridiculous toys. The iPhone turned the world on its ear. Only a silly person with no honest memory of the actual time could say otherwise.
My call quality was fine. I didn’t live in New York;)
Not if they can keep each other’s company there.
Precisely.
For all his histrionics and impenetrable Incomprehenso-gram charts, Daniel Eran Dilger had Hughes and guys like him nailed a decade ago. And now Hughes is reduced to writing the tech equivalent of “Why ‘Phantom Menace’ Was Actually Better Than You Remember” CYA articles?
Please.
Definitely agree! There was very little 3G where I lived and even if you got it, trying to browse the internet on a phone was useless! Safari made it work even on slow internet. Actually seeing the website and then being able to zoom in or out was incredible! It was sooo much better than getting the mobile version you got on a regular phone or even a so called smartphone of the day. Yes there were things the original iPhone lacked; but the touch screen and music player, and maps, and internet browsing and everything else it could do was so far ahead of others. I had Palm Pilots and Windows smartphones and hated them. Crazy to say it was junk!! Just the feeling of pressing on a piece of glass and having it respond was fantastic compared to the touchscreen on my Wndows phone that had a mushy layer on top that you pressed down to activate the touch.
I have sort of a grudging respect for Dvorak. He’s an asshole, but he wasn’t always… and at least now he’s an honest asshole.
The worst are the guys who used to be decent and have… gone insane. There’s one site in particular that used to curate reader reports somewhat. Over the years, they curated less and less and the editor started to believe some obviously untrue ones. He’s now a real douchebag with very little connection to reality. Too bad; his site used to be one of my first stops every morning (either right before or right after MacCentral).
Dvorak is still peddling misinformation that impairs the ability of consumers and decision-makers to obtain useful facts about what they might need to buy, correct?
If he were to preface every clickbait smear-piece he writes with a preamble admitting to that practice—both in the body of an article and in its headline—I’d judge him having become more honest than a boiler-room brokerage caller. Somehow, I doubt that’s going to ever happen.
I’d like to know who that other editor is. 😉
Sigh. You’re right. I miss back when he put effort into things. Some of the back cover articles in Macworld (MacUser? I forget) were great.