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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

You probably thought the original iPhone was pretty stupid, too, I would guess.

The original iPhone /was/ stupid until they relented and decided to allow 3rd party apps with the iOS 2 update.

You say that but wasn't the original vision the one that was adopted by google since? Everything in browser?

I didn't say it wasn't. I'm pointing out the parallel that some people had the vision to see that the iphone would _someday_ be game changing. Others felt smugly superior because they were blind to a future that was obviously very possible in retrospect.

Didn’t everyone recognize the first iPhone as a revolution? I mean, the entire Android team took a day off, knowing they had failed.

No, there was widespread derision. The idea that people would accept a phone without a physical keyboard was nothing short of heretical in business circles.

Steve Ballmer famously went on one of the popular morning TV news shows and laughed at the iPhone. The fact that he still had a job when he got back to Redmond explains a lot about Microsoft's stagnation under his leadership, and its subsequent return to a successful path once he was gone.

My memory is that MS laughed because they did not believe the hype. The laughing stopped when they got the first iPhones in house and were able to see how much space Apple was able to dedicate to the battery.

Not really. I had a fairly recent Treo at the time. I certainly didn't buy an iPhone when it first came out. Come the 3GS I was definitely ready to go with Apple but it wasn't an instant switch.

Of course, I was also not an Apple customer at the time except for an iPod sometime around that time.

I was also a die hard Treo user at the time but as soon as I saw the iPhone it was obvious this was the future and I got in line on release day to get one and never looked back.

When the original iPhone came out, it couldn’t run apps and didn’t have GPS. Capabilities that my Blackberry and even feature phones had.

The iPhone wasn’t really good until the iPhone 4.

My first iPhone was the 3GS and I was wowed by it (having used internet connected pagers and then phones since ‘97 (if you count SMTP with my various procmail filters as internet connected) and I was totally blown away. My memory of watching a Lego pirates YouTube movie in my living room with nary a cord or keyboard still has a bit of awe attached to it.

Don’t get me wrong. I bought an iPod Touch the first gen as soon as iOS 2 was released in 2008. I also bought an iPod Touch 4th gen when I was trying to avoid AT&T. I finally bought an iPhone 4 on Verizon.

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