> In the US, before the iPhone, the carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) had an ironclad grip on the rest of the value chain – particularly, handset makers and app makers.
This is like one of those myths where if you say it enough time, people start to believe it. There were tons of smartphones available before the iPhone that let you install any software that you wanted. My first smartphone was the Sony Ericsson P800 and it was released in 2002! I had to change carriers to use to, too.
The original iPhone was a great device with a wonderful interface, but it wasn't the invention of the smartphone. It did, however, sell the mainstream consumer market on smartphones. (The business market was long sold on the Blackberry).
The author isn't completely wrong -- the explosive growth of smartphones (and not just iPhones) has completely changed the equation. Before, everyone was trying to get on the carriers dumb phones but even if they succeeded it would mostly be a waste of time -- the phones were just too dumb and nobody cared about the crappy experience they provided.
There is way too much credit to Apple and Steve Jobs here.
You might be able to install any software you want, but the on-phone app stores and what they carry have been controlled by the carriers. That's the primary distribution channel, and the one largely responsible for providing app makers with the financial incentive to make apps.
Before the iPhone, smartphones didn't have on-phone app stores. You downloaded/purchased your applications off the web just like you do on your desktop. There was a good market for software for smartphones with lots of developers and distributors. The article would have us believe that none of that existed before Steve Jobs but that's just not true.
Dumb phones had carrier stores (and their firmware heavily customized). However, nobody I know has ever bought app for their regular 'dumb' mobile phone. Even the apps that were for free (like music players) were so horrible that they usually went unused.
Really? Granted, I never paid much attention to smart phones before the iPhone, but I find it hard to believe that none of them had on-phone app stores.
At any rate, games on dumb phones were definitely making money (I remember reading plenty of articles about how mobile phone gaming was getting huge pre-iPhone), and if you wanted to sell your dumb phone game, you had to go through the carriers.
> but I find it hard to believe that none of them had on-phone app stores.
They didn't. Carriers didn't really do too much to smartphones -- there was some customization (theme, background picture, etc) but that was it. Software is (and was) sold just as it is on the desktop.
> if you wanted to sell your dumb phone game, you had to go through the carriers.
There were tons of high quality games available for smartphones (including from big firms like EA) years before the iPhone was released. There was no on-phone store and you didn't have to go through the carrier.
The iPhone popularized the smartphone, changing the equation from the dumb phone to the smartphone. But if Apple didn't do it, someone else would have -- Android was in development (and already purchased by Google) years before the iPhone was released, for example.
You are incorrect. Carrier-provided app stores existed.
Here's a forum post from 2005 asking about the Sprint Store native app on the Treo 650, released a year earlier. As an owner of the phone, I had seen it and used it myself.
That's right, I do remember the Sprint store -- but then I wasn't on sprint and it was still completely optional. I'm not sure it was ever much of a success.
It's doubtful Android would have had the same impact as the iPhone if the iPhone hadn't existed. I can no longer find the source, but Android's interface pre-iPhone was just as uninspired as all the other smartphones around at the time. It would've taken considerably longer for other companies to hit on a genuinely good touch screen interface if they hadn't had Apple's example to follow.
Even I knew about the potential of multi-touch interfaces 18 months before the iPhone was released due to this TED talk. I'm guessing people who actually work with touch displays are well aware of the decades of published research on this topic.
Note that when Steve Jobs demos the pinch zoom nearly two years later he claims it as an Apple invention, while this guy as nearly his first comment is to name people who have worked on this technology for decades but says that the big difference now is that it's ready for production use.
Yeah, I've seen that too, and it was breathtaking. But it's a long ways from that to a full-fledged touchscreen interface for an entire operating system. Pinch zoom isn't even the half of it.
It's not just pinch zoom, though that and the keyboard that guesses where your finger is trying to type show how much of the interface is really just obvious to someone in the field once you have the basic technology (or alternatively that Apple is shamelessly ripping this guy off, either interpretation is suitable to my point). And it's not hard to go a long ways when you're not pretending to be a lone creative genius. His final paragraph:
So, multi-touch interaction research is a very active field right now in HCI. I'm not the only one doing it, there are a lot of other people getting into it. This kind of technology is going to let even more people get into it, and I'm really looking forward to interacting with all you guys over the next few days and seeing how it can apply to your respective fields. Thank you. (Applause)
This is like one of those myths where if you say it enough time, people start to believe it. There were tons of smartphones available before the iPhone that let you install any software that you wanted. My first smartphone was the Sony Ericsson P800 and it was released in 2002! I had to change carriers to use to, too.
The original iPhone was a great device with a wonderful interface, but it wasn't the invention of the smartphone. It did, however, sell the mainstream consumer market on smartphones. (The business market was long sold on the Blackberry).
The author isn't completely wrong -- the explosive growth of smartphones (and not just iPhones) has completely changed the equation. Before, everyone was trying to get on the carriers dumb phones but even if they succeeded it would mostly be a waste of time -- the phones were just too dumb and nobody cared about the crappy experience they provided.
There is way too much credit to Apple and Steve Jobs here.