My iPhone 3G was so slick and amazingly designed - not just aesthetically but from a user-interface perspective - it seemed to have come straight from a sci-fi future, created by intelligent alien beings who can give me what I want before I even know I want it. But then it came time to get rid of my Palm Treo and get a new phone. So for that sexist reason alone, I avoided getting one at first. It was just so damn pretty, and the earliest adopters in my circle of friends were, in fact, female. When the iPhone first came out, I kept calling it a phone for girls. Dan “Shoe” Hsu, Editor-in-Chief, GamesBeat But, for my money, the iPhone 4S with its killer camera and Siri integration, is still my favorite smartphone on the market.
It’s only been recently that Android devices finally feel as polished as the iPhone, with the launch of HTC’s One devices and the Samsung Galaxy S III. Since then, I’ve had my falling outs with the iPhone - especially with AT&T’s service when I moved to New York - but no other smartphone platform has managed to win me over. And with the ever-growing App Store, its potential seemed unlimited. Sure, the AT&T service wasn’t great, even in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts, but the iPhone 3GS was fast and polished. When the iPhone 3GS finally launched, I jumped ship with a quickness.
But it quickly became evident that Android didn’t launch fully cooked, and the G1’s slow hardware didn’t help the matter. Google’s first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, was in many ways a successor to the Helio Ocean and sparked my interest immediately. Once the Ocean started aging ungracefully, I pinned my hopes on Google’s fledgling Android OS. It had 3G! It had two slide-out keyboards! Clearly it was so much better than Apple’s expensive toy. And who wants to type on a freaking screen anyway?!Īt the time, I opted instead for the Helio Ocean (RIP). I poked fun at the people who paid the ridiculously high prices for the first iPhones ($499 for the 4GB version, $599 for the 8GB), especially since it didn’t even have 3G. Devindra Hardawar, National Editorįrom the beginning, I thought the iPhone was an incredibly innovative device - but one that was for snobby Apple dorks, not me. That’s a huge shift in the market, and it’s hard to believe that it happened in just five years.
Jailbreak your iPhone (or root your Android phone) and you can install absolutely anything you want. Five years later, every smartphone has an app store, and people can install almost anything they want. It used to be that phones could only run apps that carriers made available to you, usually through hard-to-navigate, locked-down “stores” that were little more than obnoxious text menus filled with useless crap. Like it or not, the iPhone did more than any other single product to reshape the smartphone business, and it caused a massive weakening of the carriers’ power too. Apple may have been arrogant, but it was justified arrogance. As the news of the iPhone’s launch came out, a colleague of mine came up to me in the Las Vegas Convention Center and said, “Did you hear the news? Apple just made this entire industry irrelevant.” That’s an exaggeration, but on the other hand, the iPhone was far more significant than anything unveiled at CES that year, both in terms of its innovation and in terms of its ultimate impact on the industry.
I placed my bets on CES, choosing the enormous tradeshow full of dozens of vendors and hundreds of new products, which I figured would be more newsworthy than a small number of new products from a single, marginal vendor. Those of us in the tech journalism business were forced to choose. In a show of monumental arrogance, Apple had scheduled its keynote directly opposite the year’s biggest gadget tradeshow, and about 500 miles to the west of it besides. I wasn’t present for the launch of the iPhone in 2007, because I was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Today on the iPhone’s fifth birthday, VentureBeat is taking a look back at the iPhone and reflecting on our earliest experiences with the landmark device. This may radically rewrite the digital balance of power…”Įven if you’re a hardcore Android fan, it’s hard to deny the impact the iPhone has had on the mobile industry, and ultimately, on the technology world in general. “It aims to be a full-fledged smart phone, and is underpinned with some elements of Apple software, such as its Safari browser, which could expose mainstream users to Apple’s eco-system in more varied ways. “It will do much more than make calls and play music,” VentureBeat’s Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall wrote when the first iPhone was announced (back when he was the only person writing at VB).