[PopePompous]

I agree with everything you said. But just as important as the technical leap was the business model improvement. Before the iPhone, at least in the US, carriers dictated what functions could and could not be present in the phones. The video offerings were nothing but short snippets of content offered at steep prices from the carriers. Phone manufacturers considered the carriers to be their real customers, and the carriers wanted to make sure that every phone feature was a money stream for them. Apple was the first manufacturer with enough clout to get a carrier (Cingular) to offer a smartphone that was not crippled by the carrier. Once the iPhone became popular, it was no longer possible for carriers to hobble the smartphones they sold, in order to nickle-and-dime their customers.

[MBCook]

Totally agree. I thought of that later (and I wasn’t sure how well it fit into the narrative of my original comment/the article) and wrote about what they did to the carriers here [1].

I remember when I got my RAZR, it was the first phone I had that could play video. I was able to watch a 3m cartoon from Boomerang (Tom and Jerry or something like that). The quality was surprisingly good.

It used up 60-70% of my battery and the little phone got very hot.

And that was a $15/month service.

And let’s not formget the mapping ‘services’ that Google and Apple completely killed.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16979353