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Can you elaborate on this? The first iPhone, yeah, it had some detractors, but I don't think the kinds of criticisms the parent poster gave ever really applied to the iPhone. To succeed, the iPhone didn't have to be this utopian product; it just had to be more useful than its main competitor, which was dumbphones. People who complained that it was missing features the Blackberry had were working from an unstated major premise that the iPhone was initially targeted at enterprise users, and I think that everyone who wasn't too busy being a pundit to see how the world works could see that that quite transparently wasn't the case. There was even a time period where I had both an iPhone for personal use and a Blackberry for work. And I think the criticism about entertainment is spot-on. By contrast, despite being extraordinarily limited compared to even the very next modal, the first iPhone was fantastic for entertainment, precisely because it was good for fostering shared experiences. It didn't take long after the device came out before you'd see groups of people clustered around an iPhone, looking at photos together on that big, vibrant, gorgeous screen. That was something that none of its competitors could do. And you better bet that people saw that happening and started wanting to have one of their own so they could have fun, too. I do think we're still in the "wait and see" phase for this product, but, unlike some of the original iPhone criticisms or cmdrtaco's original dismissal of the iPod, the criticisms this article points out feel really personally relevant to me. |