"The iPhone introduced a new model. A true great leap forward in the state of the art. Not a small screen that shows you things which you manipulate indirectly using buttons and trackballs occupying half the device’s surface area, but instead a touchscreen that occupies almost the entirety of the surface area, showing things you manipulate directly."
Nokia's N770 was close to this in 2005, and the N800 even closer by 2007. It didn't have phone hardware, but it's not a great stretch for anyone to see that phone hardware would be a useful addition at that point.
I owned one of the first Nokia 770s through their open source developer program, and it was a useful handheld computer but it was no iPhone.
iPhone features that the 770 anticipated well:
- Full-featured web browser.
- On-screen keyboard.
- App development based on a full-featured desktop toolkit adapted to a handheld screen.
Things that make it a strikingly different experience:
- Not a touch interface. The resistive touch screen on the 770 was really only usable with the stylus, and their interface designs reflected this. This didn't really start changing until after the iPhone was released.
- Not actually pocketable. To deliver a full-featured browser, Nokia used a screen with almost twice the area of the iPhone's. They didn't figure out the tricks Apple used to get a near-desktop-class web experience on a truly pocketable screen.
- UI conventions. The original Maemo tablets had a fairly desktop-like interface. Menus, dialogs, a Windows-like task bar. Plenty of hardware buttons. In contrast, the iPhone made a much cleaner break with previous UIs, popularizing things like multitouch gestures and momentum scrolling.
Not only that, but the web browser (Opera) on the 770 didn't really zoom well at all. Nothing like Mobile Safari's double-tap zooming. It is actually quite painful to use now. I occasionally break mine out but it is quickly replaced with my iPhone. It really wasn't much of a mobile platform and quite underpowered.
Tocuhscreen PDA's have been around forever, I'm actually a bit disappointed that the above quote appeared in the article.
My first smartphone was a Sony Ericsson P800 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P800 ) which was a touch screen device with a web browser and it was released in 2002! The iPhone was not, at all, revolutionary in that regard. It's merely a really good refinement (multitouch and a flush display) of what came before.
Comments
"The iPhone introduced a new model. A true great leap forward in the state of the art. Not a small screen that shows you things which you manipulate indirectly using buttons and trackballs occupying half the device’s surface area, but instead a touchscreen that occupies almost the entirety of the surface area, showing things you manipulate directly."
Nokia's N770 was close to this in 2005, and the N800 even closer by 2007. It didn't have phone hardware, but it's not a great stretch for anyone to see that phone hardware would be a useful addition at that point.
I owned one of the first Nokia 770s through their open source developer program, and it was a useful handheld computer but it was no iPhone.
iPhone features that the 770 anticipated well:
- Full-featured web browser.
- On-screen keyboard.
- App development based on a full-featured desktop toolkit adapted to a handheld screen.
Things that make it a strikingly different experience:
- Not a touch interface. The resistive touch screen on the 770 was really only usable with the stylus, and their interface designs reflected this. This didn't really start changing until after the iPhone was released.
- Not actually pocketable. To deliver a full-featured browser, Nokia used a screen with almost twice the area of the iPhone's. They didn't figure out the tricks Apple used to get a near-desktop-class web experience on a truly pocketable screen.
- UI conventions. The original Maemo tablets had a fairly desktop-like interface. Menus, dialogs, a Windows-like task bar. Plenty of hardware buttons. In contrast, the iPhone made a much cleaner break with previous UIs, popularizing things like multitouch gestures and momentum scrolling.
Not only that, but the web browser (Opera) on the 770 didn't really zoom well at all. Nothing like Mobile Safari's double-tap zooming. It is actually quite painful to use now. I occasionally break mine out but it is quickly replaced with my iPhone. It really wasn't much of a mobile platform and quite underpowered.
Tocuhscreen PDA's have been around forever, I'm actually a bit disappointed that the above quote appeared in the article.
My first smartphone was a Sony Ericsson P800 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P800 ) which was a touch screen device with a web browser and it was released in 2002! The iPhone was not, at all, revolutionary in that regard. It's merely a really good refinement (multitouch and a flush display) of what came before.