As a European I couldn't disagree more. Have you see the crap (including Nokia and Sony) that passed for smartphones before the iPhone and Android devices came along?
You also make it sound like some big conspiracy for "the tech media's fawning over Apple and Google's entry".
If there was that much better European mobiles where were/are they hidden?
That some standards (like the above for headphones) existed and were lost, I can accept. But nothing much else...
I have to disagree with you here. The first iPhone was awful and the smartphones and PDAs of the time were in my opinion way ahead of the iPhone. I will concede that the established players failed their market, as people in general (as opposed to techies) wanted a sleek device with nice UI over the features that people took for granted until the iPhone.
I know it's not to be taken seriously, but this neatly expresses my opinion at the time the iPhone came out: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone
I had the then reviewed as "best" smartphone pre-iPhone, a Sony top of the line one with a stylus. It was crap. Have also played with the Nokia communicator and others. Also crap.
Can you point to any "smartphones and PDAs of the time" that were "ahead of the iPhone" with an actual link to a product page/review/wikipedia, so we can see if that was the case?
>as people in general (as opposed to techies) wanted a sleek device with nice UI over the features that people took for granted until the iPhone.
If those devices didn't have a sleek device and a nice UI what did they have over the iPhone? More features? Features are nothing without the form factor and usability. The internet browsing experience, for example, in those phones were beyond crap.
I strongly disagree.
> Can you point to any "smartphones and PDAs of the time" that were "ahead of the iPhone" with an actual link to a product page/review/wikipedia, so we can see if that was the case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_TyTN_II
The difference between these devices and the iPhone baffles me to this day. Yeah the iPhone had a better UI, but it didn't even have 3G, Apps, IM, MMS, Copy&Paste and a whole load of other features. You couldn't even open a socket or ping a machine with it.
> Features are nothing without the form factor and usability.
Again, I strongly disagree. Features are everything, while a sleek UI is worthless if you know your way around the apps you care about.
Unrelated to the iPhone, I consider the trend to "dumb down" UI such that untrained users can have pleasant user experiences without prior knowledge to be annoying and misguided. Obviously that's what the market wants, but I find it frustrating when apps or services are lacking features that people have been taking for granted for 20 years.
> [...] The internet browsing experience, for example, in those phones were beyond crap.
I'm willing to concede that the browsing experience on the iPhone was far superior to all other smartphones at the time. However, I would argue that even on the iPhone the browsing experience was kinda crap, as there was no mobile web to speak of in 2007 and the usability of desktop sites on mobile was hit and miss.
What i gained with an android phone was a larger screen and gimmicks.
And i lost the ability to do navigation with one hand only without looking at the damn thing.
Android devices where not perfect. There was lag (not the occasional hitch we complain about today, actual lag) from time to time, and interface was somewhat unpolished. But the browser worked. Loading full websites and using them was relatively pain-free. Scrolling through lists was responsive and the hardware was better for the same amount of money. And lastly, the Android Market had actual apps that I ended up using and Google Maps was excellent. There was hardly any comparison.
Almost always when a US company enters a global market, it leads to a massive setback for the rest of the world.
Think about credit cards – Europe has been slowly migrating to VISA and MasterCards with their insane fees, away from the old EuroCheque and EC Card system (which had lower fees, and better safety).
At the same time, every German company in the EU leads to worse results for the countries that are yet even more advanced, say, the Netherlands (Net Neutrality comes to mind).
Regarding net-neutrality, T-mobile is currently actively zero-rating music in the Netherlands.
Which was banned in the Netherlands until the recent EU-wide Net Neutrality law, which improved Net Neutrality in 27 EU countries, but made it slightly worse in the Netherlands. (It allows Zero-Rating).