[vidarh]

I don't think anyone didn't think it was possible. Back in '99 I was working on a tablet w/built in phone, and Ericsson had their ScreenPhone around the same time. Both where "tethered" to a base station at home (ours used a custom extension to DECT), I believe, but the intent was always to add proper mobile support.

In fact, when I was first sold on the concept, the guy who started the company talked me through how he imagined a "home base station" that he'd use while there, and how he wanted the device to smoothly hand off to the mobile network if he took it out of the house.

The choice of a tablet over a smaller phone was about a convenient screen size, coupled with the initial devices being tied to the home anyway. But "everyone" around us had PalmPilots, and "everyone" expected PDAs and phones to merge eventually (and they did, sort of, but to see Palm giving in and going with a keyboard was a disappointment).

The challenge was that around the time the iPhone launched, people did not believe the market was there yet, nor that the hardware was ready, largely because "everyone else" had a go too early, failed, and essentially shelved the idea for the next decade as something that was way too early.

What Apple got exactly right and everyone else messed up was the timing.

E.g. we were shopping around our tablet prototype in '99 and 2000 based on a 100MHz or thereabouts 486 clone w/32MB RAM running Opera and a custom UI w/resistive touch. It was a fantastic device at the time, but the combination of not yet being able to provide a proper GSM enabled device, too short battery life, low RAM, slow, horrible resistive touch, and it was a device that would have appealed mostly to a small niche of geeks, but to work financally it needed to be a mass market device.

With the available hardware in 2006 we'd have a great starting point if we had started around then. But when we started in '99 the discussion was never "can these hardware constraints work in a way that can appeal to a mass market?" but "this is the price we need for it to work as a mass market device, and here are the tech specs that can fit within that price" and then we tried to make something that could be mass market from that... way too early.

To be clear: I'm not trying to downplay what Apple did. They made a product that appealed to a vastly larger market because they understood. But it wasn't because nobody else believed in touch enabled smart phones or tablets, but because they approached it from a usability and marketability perspective first, while everyone else were thinking like geeks willing to sacrifice usability for a "imagine if.." ideal of devices that were ultimately quite unfulfilling.

When the iPhone came out, a lot of us were pretty much "so what?" because we still did not understand the significance of that wait. We'd seen full screen touch, and we'd seen PDA's married with touch, and we'd seen larger tablet type devices (basically laptops with pivot screens mostly), and the iPhone to many people who'd been through the first round of hype around these type of devices just seemed like more of the same at first.

Until it became clear just how much of a difference the hardware advances and Apple's design had made to the whole thing.

We absolutely agree about their timing, and I think it's important not to underestimate how important it is to understand when the time is right and not get caught up in constraints that applied last year because that's when you started thinking about it.

It's very possible that we'll see something similar with cars. A lot of people have worked on driverless cars for a very long time, and the question is how much of the current designs are based on preconceptions that seemed to make sense a few years back, but where things can be done better today.

[mcphage]

> The challenge was that around the time the iPhone launched, people did not believe the market was there yet, nor that the hardware was ready, largely because "everyone else" had a go too early, failed, and essentially shelved the idea for the next decade as something that was way too early.

> What Apple got exactly right and everyone else messed up was the timing.

My [perhaps mistaken] understanding is that Apple had been working on it for a while; but rather than try before the hardware was ready, and shelve the idea, they kept working on the idea until the hardware caught up. They had a solid idea of how it should work, and waited until it could, rather than have it just be a thing they tried and gave up on.

[vidarh]

Yes, that's the story I've heard too, and I can absolutely believe that. While the rest of us threw stuff at the wall and got frustrated when it didn't stick, they had a benchmark to aim for.

Here's an early article on our attempt [1], and you can see how far the specs were from a tolerable tablet or from being able to shrink the it down to a phone form factor (the original design actually called for a very small dumb handset for the tablet that magnetically attached to the speaker magnets in the tablet, and induction charged; amusingly Sony finally relased a handset for one of their phablets a couple of years ago - we were over a decade ahead of our time ;) )

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/freepad-norways-alternative-to-...

[jdmichal]

> ... while everyone else were thinking like geeks willing to sacrifice usability for a "imagine if.." ideal of devices that were ultimately quite unfulfilling.

As someone who was there on the consumer side, with an HTC Wizard bought in 2006 -- the year before the iPhone was released -- I completely agree with this. I did make the sacrifice of usability, because having the Internet accessible everywhere on a touchscreen was awesome. I didn't understand the iPhone either. From the perspective of the hackfest that was Windows Mobile 5/6, I saw a very limited and locked down device.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wizard

[soylentcola]

Also had WinMo phones prior to the iPhone (and after one Palm Treo). I definitely appreciated the things the first iPhone(s) got right because they were things that always seemed like they should work better on my WinMo devices but were always somehow screwed up (on-chip GPU without the necessary software to use it for graphic acceleration was a big one).

At the same time, it was still a choice between finally getting a more responsive interface or giving up front/rear cameras, GPS, 3G cell radio, third party apps, multitasking, copy/paste, an actual file system I could browse, streaming audio (anyone remember Shoutcast stations? They're still around!), streaming video, hell...even changing my wallpaper or ringtone to something that didn't come with the phone.

I totally get why Apple succeeded and in many ways they deserved to: they didn't try to out-WinMo WinMo. They looked at the things that Microsoft, RIM, Palm, and the rest weren't doing and targeted those things. They saw who wasn't interested in having a miniature version of a laptop but loved simple and responsive electronics (thousands and thousands of regular consumers). That business savvy put them in a really strong position that continues to this day.

Granted it didn't help that you needed to switch carriers to AT&T and spend even more than the cost of existing smart phones to get one but clearly they improved that along with all the rest.

I'm still far from an Apple fanboy and I find using iOS on my iPad to be frustrating at least once every week or two but business/market success isn't about pleasing me. It's about pleasing enough people to make a good profit and clearly they've got that part down.