[shenberg]

I'll bite on the Symbian claim.

Saying that the iPhone is not leaps and bounds better than anything else in the market at the time is disingenuous - if you used both the N95's browser (with the crummy joystick-controlled mouse) and the iPhone's multitouch browser, you'd know there is no comparison.

I'll go further and say the Nokia phones at the time were much more marketing-driven. They had huge checklists of features _so that marketing could say they have "more features"_ (e.g. irDA), but the core experience was poor (unresponsive and confusing UI, bad input methods) it didn't matter.

Did Nokia make better phones? In one sense, yes - they had longer battery lives, better cameras, they worked much better as phones, for chrissake. But, in the most important way, the iPhone blew everything out of the water - which phone people would prefer to use. I preferred a usable browsing and mapping experience to the jack-of-all-trades and master of none approach of Nokia phones, and apparently, so did the market.

[eckyptang]

Well you kind of justified my point:

The iPhone is a crappy phone with crappy battery life and has a crappy camera. None of this is desirable nor unique (O2 XDA kind of nailed all of these in 2002).

Apple however made it successful through marketing.

And don't mention usable mapping after the last week or so :)

[Synaesthesia]

It's got a good web browser, good media playback, good apps and games, and good display. The camera isn't crappy either IMO.

[whatusername]

on launch the iPhone didn't have a great camera. (Or apps)