> The iPhone drove the creation of the modern smartphone market. Before 2007, only businessmen carried Blackberries. Now pre-teens have smartphones.
That's a very US-centric view of it: European "lambda consumers" were already heavily drawn to smartphones by the time the iphone arrived, mostly via Nokia's "N" series, the N95 was a rather popular phone at the time for instance).
Speaking as someone who owned both back in 2007, the original iPhone was still a quantum leap forward from the Nokia N95.
You could bullet-point the capabilities of each device and end up with surprisingly similar lists, but the functional superiority of the iPhone was still remarkably unambiguous. It was like holding an artifact from the near future.
> Speaking as someone who owned both back in 2007, the original iPhone was still a quantum leap forward from the Nokia N95.
Absolutely, I wasn't trying to say the smartphones of the time were fantastic and there's clearly a pre-iphone and a post-iphone, my post was simply that the consumer world was not a smartphone-less vacuum before the iphone, the US were.
The Nokia N95, a series-60 device with a numeric keypad, can't possibly be seriously taken as a smartphone. Such a claim wouldn't have even passed the sniff test back when it was released -- it was just a riotously expensive feature-laden feature-phone. Compared to the Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices of the time, it was pretty weak.
That's a very US-centric view of it: European "lambda consumers" were already heavily drawn to smartphones by the time the iphone arrived, mostly via Nokia's "N" series, the N95 was a rather popular phone at the time for instance).