Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone.
I think Apple's stroke of genius was in the software and UI/UX.
I think Apple's stroke of genius was in the software and UI/UX.
Which, in the end, helped us a ton with Android -- post iPhone announcement everyone wanted to compete with that, nobody knew how, and the carriers eased back a bit on their absurd requirements documents full of random features nobody cared about (WAP?).
At the time iPhone was announced we were already running on the prototype of what became G1 (Dream), with multitouch. We just expected it would be the second form factor to ship, after a more "traditional" blackberry wedge sort of thing (Sooner). Post-iPhone it seemed silly to ship such a device first (you can imagine the reaction), so we skipped it and shifted focus to Dream.
WAP made sense for its time: limited computing power, limited bandwidth, super low data caps.
I agree (more or less) with the fact that someone would have come out with something similar. I strongly disagree that it would have changed the world.
Apple had the "courage" to go all-in on the form factor with the retail footprint to sell it, and of course the built-in fan base and long history of innovation to make it interesting even in its fairly primitive form.
Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential, or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives, and their "iPhone" would have just been another dusty device in the corner of an AT&T store that no one knew how to use.
Maybe small manufacturers, but if Nokia or Motorola had done it first (with good software) maybe we'd be a in different world.
> or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives
Nokia or Motorola wouldn't have bet their phone business on a single UI/hardware combination like Apple did, and so I don't believe it would have had the technological impact the iPhone did.
Even if they had something great, the US focus of tech media would have made it hard to see, and the US/EU frequency differences would have made it hard to use in the US unless Nokia made a US version, but lack of distribution makes that less likely.
The removal of the keyboard, in particular, was far from universally perceived as a good idea at the time.
I also think it would have been quite a while before anybody would have had the guts to not provide a slot for memory cards or to not have removable batteries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
> It was first announced on 12 December 2006.
> It is the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen.
> The LG Prada was announced shortly <<before>> Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007.
> After the release of the iPhone the head of the LG Mobile Handset R&D Center was quoted saying he believed Apple had stolen the idea from the KE850 after it was announced as part of the iF Design Award.