[jnky]

> Have you see the crap (including Nokia and Sony) that passed for smartphones before the iPhone and Android devices came along?

I have to disagree with you here. The first iPhone was awful and the smartphones and PDAs of the time were in my opinion way ahead of the iPhone. I will concede that the established players failed their market, as people in general (as opposed to techies) wanted a sleek device with nice UI over the features that people took for granted until the iPhone.

I know it's not to be taken seriously, but this neatly expresses my opinion at the time the iPhone came out: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

[coldtea]

>I have to disagree with you here. The first iPhone was awful and the smartphones and PDAs of the time were in my opinion way ahead of the iPhone

I had the then reviewed as "best" smartphone pre-iPhone, a Sony top of the line one with a stylus. It was crap. Have also played with the Nokia communicator and others. Also crap.

Can you point to any "smartphones and PDAs of the time" that were "ahead of the iPhone" with an actual link to a product page/review/wikipedia, so we can see if that was the case?

>as people in general (as opposed to techies) wanted a sleek device with nice UI over the features that people took for granted until the iPhone.

If those devices didn't have a sleek device and a nice UI what did they have over the iPhone? More features? Features are nothing without the form factor and usability. The internet browsing experience, for example, in those phones were beyond crap.

[jnky]

> I had the then reviewed as "best" smartphone pre-iPhone, a Sony top of the line one with a stylus. It was crap. Have also played with the Nokia communicator and others. Also crap.

I strongly disagree.

> Can you point to any "smartphones and PDAs of the time" that were "ahead of the iPhone" with an actual link to a product page/review/wikipedia, so we can see if that was the case?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_TyTN_II

The difference between these devices and the iPhone baffles me to this day. Yeah the iPhone had a better UI, but it didn't even have 3G, Apps, IM, MMS, Copy&Paste and a whole load of other features. You couldn't even open a socket or ping a machine with it.

> Features are nothing without the form factor and usability.

Again, I strongly disagree. Features are everything, while a sleek UI is worthless if you know your way around the apps you care about.

Unrelated to the iPhone, I consider the trend to "dumb down" UI such that untrained users can have pleasant user experiences without prior knowledge to be annoying and misguided. Obviously that's what the market wants, but I find it frustrating when apps or services are lacking features that people have been taking for granted for 20 years.

> [...] The internet browsing experience, for example, in those phones were beyond crap.

I'm willing to concede that the browsing experience on the iPhone was far superior to all other smartphones at the time. However, I would argue that even on the iPhone the browsing experience was kinda crap, as there was no mobile web to speak of in 2007 and the usability of desktop sites on mobile was hit and miss.