| I remember being very excited about these devices (and others like the Treo) before they were released, then invariably found myself profoundly disappointed (or at the very least underwhelmed) when I actually got my hands on one. None of them really succeeded in delivering anything more than an iPaq or a Palm Pilot and a mobile phone awkwardly squashed together in an ugly package, and they all required you to use a stylus that all-too-frequently got lost or broken. In the case of the 770, it didn't even have a phone! (To be fair though, in its favour it was the first device I saw that had a really good mobile web browser app). Until the iPhone, "smartphone" really meant putting "groupware" [1] functionality in a mobile phone, and just having an Outlook-a-like on a phone clearly wasn't appealing enough for the mass market: in fact it was just downright boring... The biggest difference with the iPhone aside from the capacitive touch was that it delivered an excellent mobile web browser alongside a reasonably decent phone, and all that other stuff was just an afterthought. In retrospect I'm amazed that nobody else realised that the web - the same technology that transformed the internet from a niche technology into a must-have in the mid-90's - was the killer app for a smartphone (As I alluded to above though, kudos to Ari Jaaksi's team for at least trying with the N770 etc., even though the rest of Nokia seemed to be utterly clueless). [1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html |