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by greggman 3224 days ago
there is a 20+ year history of PDAs before the iPhone. For all intents and purposes my 1998 Windows CE Casio PDA looks and acts like a first gen iPhone. It's home screen has a grid of 3x4 icons of apps and general works very analogous to the iPhone. Apple did an amazing job of polishing the PDA but they made an incremental jump being at the right place at the right time with affordable cellular data and capacitive touch and an amazingly well designed ui

it sounds like they we're doing much more with their car efforts

2 comments

   > capacitive touch
Without this I do not thing anything qualifies as "acts like first gen iPhone".
> For all intents and purposes my 1998 Windows CE Casio PDA looks and acts like a first gen iPhone

I assume you also think a Hyundai looks and acts like a Ferrari.

Because that is what you are saying. I owned that PDA as well as the Treo 650 which was far better and the iPhone isn't an incremental jump. It was a complete revolution.

I assume you also think a Hyundai looks and acts like a Ferrari.

Compared to a car with freakin' spherical wheels, yes, it does.

> I assume you also think a Hyundai looks and acts like a Ferrari.

He argued against an assumption that apple reinvented smartphone. If you want to use this argument, you have to show that people think that Ferrari reinvented the car.

Only if Ferrari came into the market with a bunch of innovations that every manufacturer then adopts. I would call that a reinvention and more or less what Apple did.

People were using styluses, the phones were blocky and thick, the UI was confusing and adopted from desktop instead designed for mobile, hardware keyboards, small screens, business focused

I had every "smartphone" and internet tablet back in day running on Palm, Symbian, Blackberry. All of those OS's are completely irrelevant today because of how far Apple pushed the envelope. Though I thought Palm was headed in the right direction with the Pre.

You can call it an evolution but it was such a major leap it was essentially a redefinition.

The Hyundai Coupe from about ~15 years ago looked rather like a Ferrari 456. In fact some adverts here in the UK actually showed them side-by-side.