[Nikker]

I got on board with the 3GS and IOS 3.0. I can't say that your complaints are justified. The web experience was pretty good because you would 'zoom' in on the part of the page you were reading. It had enough memory to run 1 app at a time but each app worked smoothly. I also jail broke mine and was using ssh to login to my home PC while on the bus to work and it was pretty epic at the time. No other phone could do that kind of thing and now I guess the rest is history.

[icebraining]

I also jail broke mine and was using ssh to login to my home PC while on the bus to work and it was pretty epic at the time. No other phone could do that kind of thing

PuTTY has been supported on Nokia phones since 2004: http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/news.html

I didn't use it, but I did have a Python interpreter running on my E65 (with APIs for camera, GPS, calling, etc) before the iPhone 1 was even released.

[MichaelGG]

There was no SSH client for Windows Mobile? Or the Nokia N? Or go back even further to the Danger Sidekick? Not saying the iPhone wasn't a smoother experience but other phones could do "that kind of thing".

[trothoun]

I used my clamshell feature phone to login to my home pc via ssh. Granted, the typing experience was pretty painful, but it did work. People seem to forget that 'app stores' have been around a lot longer than the iphone. It's just that the earlier versions of app stores, carrier decks, were managed by carriers who cared a lot more about preventing apps from interfering with their business than they did about providing their customers with good, useful apps. And they ran on operating systems that were customized or custom written by carriers who saw them primarily as a marketing tool useful for pushing their more expensive services.

http://www.midpssh.org/

[coldtea]

>People seem to forget that 'app stores' have been around a lot longer than the iphone

And they rightly forget them -- they were awful, over-expensive crap. $10 for some BS casual game, $30 for a TODO app etc. And don't get me started on the Java ME crap.

[seestheday]

I think that more importantly they were either run by carriers or crippled by carriers.

iPhone changed the whole carrier/manufacturer/customer dynamic for the better (this is coming from a diehard BlackBerry user).