[mikestew]

320x480 screen meant normal web pages wouldn't display properly

I’m not sure what you mean by that. The whole point of the demo was it rendered the New York Times website just as it rendered in desktop Safari. In contrast to, say, Windows Mobile which would butcher the rendering. If the touch targets were too small, well, through the wonders of multitouch, pinch to zoom in.

the web was unusable because it required rewriting every page since existing pages were unusable

You’re remembering a much different iPhone than I am. Are you sure not confusing it with WinMo 5/6? Because then we’d be in some agreement.

[bryanlarsen]

It rendered just fine on the sharp Zaurus or the Nokia phone sized Linux tablets, and was a much more pleasant experience than the iPhone pinch and zoom and pan and scroll.

But but on any mainstream phones. The phone I reference didn't exist. It could have and should have. If it did, perhaps Nokia would have survived.

[phire]

> It could have and should have.

From a technical perspective, yes. You are basically talking about the Nokia N800 but with a cellphone modem and a bit of effort spent shrinking the bezels down.

But from a product design perspective, I suspect it was impossible to make that leap. We are talking about the point when cellphones were at their very smallest. The 1st gen iphone with it's 3.5" display was considered to be large for a phone. Nobody thought mainstream users would be happy pocketing a phone with a "massive" 4.13" display.

And Nokia were only happy excluding the keyboard from the N800 because it was considered to be a content consumption device. At that time, smartphones were regarded as productivity devices (for email) and the physical keyboard was essential, which would have bulked out the device (See N810).

I don't think we could have gotten to today's large smartphones without first creating a viable browsing experience on an iphone sized display.

[bryanlarsen]

Not impossible, it only required a small amount of vision and risk taking. Which Nokia et al obviously lacked.

> Nobody thought mainstream users would be happy pocketing a phone with a "massive" 4.13" display.

Yet it was exceedingly obvious there was a very profitable sizeable niche of users that were willing to do so.

And it shouldn't have taken very much imagination to realize that "web in the pocket" was useful in 2008, and would quickly become much more useful in 2009, 2010 etc as the population of people with the web in their pocket grew and companies started to serve the market.

The big problem was that all of those phone companies were hardware companies. Putting Firefox in a phone was a challenge beyond them. Microsoft could have and should have done it, but they were dysfunctional at the time.

[jbverschoor]

I loved my zaurus SL-5000D. The keyboard was great, although the buttons were kind of clickey and you had to press them quite hard