How did we get to the iPhone?
Monday, October 22, 2012 at 3:01AM 
This article was originally going to be released as an eBook, but it ended up falling in between a blog post (too long) and an eBook (too short). It is still just shy of 12,000 words and so will take some time to read, but I hope you enjoy the content and the meaning behind it. Just click the image above to read it or go here.
Foreword
This is not a story that charts the exact history of mobile computing nor is it a trivial account of the process we have gone through to get to the iPhone and other smartphones that make up our mobile computing lives today. It is built from my personal experience of using mobile computers, in all their variants, over the past two decades. It looks back at the trials and difficulties these products have brought with them and the place we find ourselves today. I am British and so there is a UK bias, but I guess there is little I can do to change that. This means that the first section, focussed on Psion, may seem alien to you, but the rest should not. In comparison to what has been, today is a mobile utopia that we should all be grateful for and I hope to explain why without delving into too many specifics or too much geeky detail...
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Reader Comments (16)
Great piece !
Very nice article, however my conclusion would be different. For me Android has the simplicity and grace of the Psion PDA's. It's also very confronting to see all those devices in your article...used them all (except for the Newton) ;-)
Very good Shaun and very enjoyable to read.
I know that it's not easy to address all this progress in a text, but you have done it very well. The thing that attracts me is that I also lived many of the occasions you describe and remember well those days... it was just the beginning (then) as we are now still in the beginning of some great stuff to come. Time is really advancing fast!
Fortunately there's a cool guy like you that keeps all your memoires for us to read from time to time :-)
Interesting potted history, although rather biased towards the iPhone and dismissive of those who disagree that we owe everything to the iPhone.
Just to take one fairly key part: "Almost every feature that was made popular by the iPhone has made its way to the other mobile platforms; app stores, pinch to zoom, sliding things to unlock, voice recognition, accelerometers, compasses etc. etc. It is time to admit that the smartphone industry of today is made up of the iPhone and other platforms that have followed it every step of the way."
The key part there is 'made popular'. Did Apple actually come up with any of that themselves? Were they the first to implement any of them?
Slide to unlock? Nope, check this out around the four minute mark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-KS2kfIr0. Also check out your door, garden gate etc.
Voice recognition? Nope, Voice Commander on Windows Mobile pre-dated it by a long way and worked pretty well. And that was far from the first.
Accelerometer? Nope, Nokia 5500 had one in 2005.
App stores? Not unless you're narrowing your criteria significantly to exclude the likes of Handango.
Compass? Nope, Nokia 6210 Navigator had it in 2008; the iPhone didn't get it till 2009 (the 3GS).
Pinch to zoom? Nope, DiamondTouch had it in 2001: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKWe9U5PHmQ. That technology was demonstrated to Apple in 2003.
What Apple did was to make a smartphone and OS that appealed to the mainstream and market it and themselves fantastically well. This rejeuvenated the industry and current smartphones wouldn't be anywhere near as good as they are if the iPhone hadn't come along. However very little that you first saw in an iPhone was first done in an iPhone.
"Interesting potted history, although rather biased towards the iPhone and dismissive of those who disagree that we owe everything to the iPhone."
It's not biased- they are my thoughts on how the various devices affected me and my life. It's a 'preference' that I have for the iPhone and the way it works and I still firmly believe that the iPhone is the benchmark for most of the other phones out there today. Maybe not on a technical level, but from almost every one.
"The key part there is 'made popular'. Did Apple actually come up with any of that themselves? Were they the first to implement any of them?"
Exactly, the key part is 'made popular'- I didn't say they invented them, but they made these features popular and on most they implemented them much better.
"Slide to unlock? Nope, check this out around the four minute mark..."
Yes, checked it, seen it before. It's not good is it?
"Voice recognition? Nope, Voice Commander on Windows Mobile pre-dated it by a long way and worked pretty well. And that was far from the first."
And it was crap. I remember it well.
"Accelerometer? Nope, Nokia 5500 had one in 2005."
It did indeed, but it was somewhat pointless on a phone with a screen like that one.
"App stores? Not unless you're narrowing your criteria significantly to exclude the likes of Handango."
In the grand scheme of things no one used them- app stores now have millions and millions of customers. Handango and PalmGear would never have got to such levels and were working in a 'niche' market.
"Pinch to zoom? Nope, DiamondTouch had it in 2001: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKWe9U5PHmQ. That technology was demonstrated to Apple in 2003."
And no one cared at the time because the feature wasn't implemented well at all.
"What Apple did was to make a smartphone and OS that appealed to the mainstream and market it and themselves fantastically well. This rejeuvenated the industry and current smartphones wouldn't be anywhere near as good as they are if the iPhone hadn't come along. However very little that you first saw in an iPhone was first done in an iPhone."
Which is what I said in the article. It doesn't matter who did it first, but who gets it into the mainstream and who does it best. It's not all about marketing either, it's still a very, very good device in its own right. It's not always dismissive of others or biased to have a preference and to express it.
As you say, Apple may not have been the first to implement any of these technologies, but it did put them together in a way which, in itself, seems worthy of recognition.
I think the same about FaceTime. When operators in the UK spent a fortune on spectrum for 3G, they thought video calling would be the killer use case. It was not. Even Skype, which I used for video calling almost daily for years, is not as slick as the overall FaceTime experience. Apple was certainly not the first to enable video calling, it has done it very well. I think the same about the integration with Mountain Lion, as with iMessage. Slick. And I currently work for a traditional operator...
I think most people who used smartphones and PDAs used app stores; there just weren't that many of us compared to now.
Voice Commander worked pretty well for me, but I only used it for playing music ("play <trackname>" or "play "). From what you've said before Siri is crap too, and I wouldn't say that voice recognition is popular even now.
"It doesn't matter who did it first, but who gets it into the mainstream and who does it best."
That's kinda dangerous, and is completely counter to how the patent system is supposed to protect invention. "Yeah you invented that thing, but we put it on a million phones and that's what matters so now we own it". I don't want to put words into your mouth but to me that does seem to be what you're saying.
There's a common misconception that if something was on an iPhone then Apple invented that something and somehow owns it and no-one else is allowed to do anything like it. Apple is suing over at least two of the things I mentioned in my previous post, and several other things they didn't invent. This makes it important, to me at least, to make it clear just what Apple did and didn't invent.
"but to deny that the iPhone inspired the majority of what we see in smartphones today would be to do so without reality being part of your argument"
The bias I'm talking about is that in a big section entitled 'Copying' there's a lot about what others have copied and nothing at all about what Apple copied. In fact the things I went through in my previous post were mentioned in this same 'Copying' section as if others were copying them from Apple. If they were then Apple copied them first. It's like saying Microsoft copied Apple copying Xerox, but you left out the bit abour Xerox.
A lot of what was in the iPhone was 'inspired by' (copied from) existing devices so suggesting it's the source of "the majority of what we see in smartphones today" is misleading, and to say that anyone who disagrees with you is out of touch with reality is dismissive.
I guess ultimately I'd prefer to see something entitled "How did we get to the Samsung Galaxy Note II?", which to me is the current pinnacle of smartphone evolution. I guess it could be a long wait, possibly until we've all evolved bigger hands ;o)
"From what you've said before Siri is crap too, and I wouldn't say that voice recognition is popular even now."
It is much better now than it was in iOS 5 and easily the best I have used to date, but I agree that it is not mainstream, and likely never will be.
"This makes it important, to me at least, to make it clear just what Apple did and didn't invent."
Not in the context of this article which is mainly about my experience and how the iPhone is the only smartphone that gives the same feelings as the Psions did for me. It's not a political look at who is right and wrong and what is better. It's my perception of the phones I have used and how the iPhone has influenced much of what we see now.
"The bias I'm talking about is that in a big section entitled 'Copying' there's a lot about what others have copied and nothing at all about what Apple copied. In fact the things I went through in my previous post were mentioned in this same 'Copying' section as if others were copying them from Apple. If they were then Apple copied them first. It's like saying Microsoft copied Apple copying Xerox, but you left out the bit abour Xerox."
The point I was making was that all of those things that appeared on the iPhone suddenly appeared on every other smartphone. When each of those features were invented, no one even noticed. That is why the line "but to deny that the iPhone inspired the majority of what we see in smartphones today would be to do so without reality being part of your argument" is valid.
"I guess ultimately I'd prefer to see something entitled "How did we get to the Samsung Galaxy Note II?", which to me is the current pinnacle of smartphone evolution."
If it was a smartphone (runs and hides...:))
@Neil: "As you say, Apple may not have been the first to implement any of these technologies, but it did put them together in a way which, in itself, seems worthy of recognition."
Absolutely, which I recognised in the preceding paragraph and have done many times before. Would I put the iPhone above, say, the Clié, XDA devices etc. in influence? Frankly I'm not qualified to judge them, and given Shaun's experience it's actually what I would have liked to have had more of in the article.
If the article wants to tell us how we got to the iPhone it should detail what the iPhone owes to the previous devices. Otherwise it's just a list of what went before and then "Pow" there's the iPhone. The list is interesting but gives no real understanding beyond the chronology.
I think you are looking into it too deeply and worrying that it is too pro-iPhone.
The fact is that for me, no matter what came before, the iPhone was 'the' big leap.
I think we need to add some facts. Siri is not crap. Right lets move on.
MS Voicecommander was gimmicky and a memory hog. And limited.
Siri. Learns the more you use it. Also, swap iPhones and it still remembers you. That is cool. In the car, Siri is a genius and a brilliant assistant. And all hands free. At home it is used less, but still very handy. Cooking. Set timer for "x" mins. Perfectly carried out. Set alarms, and so on. Great when hands are tied up doing other chores. This whole reply dictated first time using Siri. Siri apologies for any errors.
Siri is the future. We just don't know it yet. Shaun in 10 years time, you'll look back at this post of mine. And comment on such an intelligent educated response.
@Shaun i guess if you can say a copy inspired further copies then yes; I think the inspiration should be the original but then we're down to semantics.
"I think you are looking into it too deeply and worrying that it is too pro-iPhone."
Well I could just have said "Yeah great stuff, you da man!" but isn't this a more interesting discussion?
My girlfriend says it's a phone and she's always right. You dissin' my bird? ;op
Interesting article and subsequent discussion. Thanks Shaun. Can we have a presidential style televised debate between Shaun and Bug? Much more interesting than American politics.
Actually my real name's Sean, so we could include a discussion on which is the 'best' spelling ;o)
Interesting. I'm not so sure about the XDA devices, although I was a fan of the XDA IIs, but Sony brought a considerable dollop of class to otherwise quite dull PDAs... I remember the SJ30 very fondly indeed.
(Truth be told, I bought an iPhone (cheaply, thanks to a messed up sales model and a swift unlock) not long after it came out, used it for a while, and then put it in a drawer in favour of a Desire — lack of 3G and GPS was sufficient to render it insufficiently useful to me.)
From what I remember the XDA devices brought smartphones into the mainstream more than previous devices had. They still weren't properly mainstream, it took the iPhone to manage that, but they got closer. I may be misremembering it though.