[JimDabell]

Very little of this rings true for me, but that part worst of all.

The mobile web pre-iPhone was terrible. Nobody used it, nobody wanted to use it, and nobody wanted to build it. At best there was a shitty cut back version on the `m` subdomain. WAP/WML were terrible and didn’t give you anything close to the real web, and XHTML Basic was still-born.

The iPhone came along with its “desktop class web browser” and it genuinely worked. Steve Jobs got on stage and told everybody if they wanted to build apps for the iPhone, they should be web apps. Then he told everybody Flash was terrible – which it was – and that we should all use open standards instead.

Practically overnight, everybody commissioning websites wanted them to be “iPhone-compatible”. They did not ask for mobile sites – they specifically asked for them to be iPhone-compatible.

And because WebKit was open-source (thanks to it being based upon KHTML), all the other phone vendors took the code and ran with it, including Android.

This is why I say there is no single organisation that has done more to push the mobile web forward than Apple. The difference in attitudes and capability towards the mobile web changed practically overnight, and it’s directly attributable to Apple’s intentional actions to develop and promote the mobile web.

[benj111]

What 'real' web are you going to get on a 1.5in phone screen?

What real web are you going to get when there's no 3g, much less a reliable signal on a lot of places.

Wap worked well for actually relaying information.

[JimDabell]

The original iPhone had a 3.5” screen, Wi-Fi, and EDGE. The iPhone 3G came a year later, with, shockingly, 3G. So yeah, that web browser that actually worked did actually work. Sure, it was slow compared with today’s speeds, but giving people what they want slowly matters far more than giving people what they don’t want marginally faster. Remember most people were on dial-up at home back in those days so the web was hardly fast on desktop either.

WAP might’ve been able to convey information, but so could Lynx in an 80×24 terminal – people want more than that. WAP sites were never popular (aside from some Japanese platform, IIRC) and I don’t think the average web developer had even heard of WAP or WML at the height of their popularity.

[stuaxo]

There were loads of Symbian/S60 phones with browsers.

2.5g/GPRS was usable enough at the time.

WAP was more 1999, a lot happened between that and the iPhone.

[nasretdinov]

Symbian phones were also based on WebKit, however it wasn't nearly as usable due to many factors, mostly because it emulated mouse pointer (and you controlled it via the joystick) and didn't provide the pinch-to-zoom fluidity of the iPhone Safari. Also iPhone supported most of the major fonts used on the web, had font smoothing, etc. I've used both Symbian WebKit and Safari on first iPhone, and they aren't even close even though they're based on the same underlying browser tech.

[JimDabell]

I’m not saying the iPhone was the first phone with a web browser, I’m saying that it was the first phone with a web browser that was good enough for average people to want to use it.

Clients were lining up en masse for iPhone-compatible websites, but none of them ever cared about S60 compatibility.

[queenkjuul]

Nobody that was paying for mobile data in 2007 was still using dial-up at home, at least not in the US, and they'd been using broadband at work and at school for at least a few years before that, too

[HeavyStorm]

> Very little of this rings true

How old are you? I'm betting mid-twenties.