To me this device resembles my Motorola flip a lot more than it resembles Apple's iPhone. And that's fine, but let's not try to stretch an already nebulous term beyond all recognition.
To me this device resembles my Motorola flip a lot more than it resembles Apple's iPhone. And that's fine, but let's not try to stretch an already nebulous term beyond all recognition.
In the first ipod touch and iphone there was a flag set to not be able to create events in the calendar app! (Calendar was read-only).
Later updates fixed it but if you had an ipod touch you needed to pay for the update (maybe 15$?).
I remember a college friend of mine playing games on his "smartphone" while sitting on the toilet in 2002. (The iPhone came out in 2007.)
His phone ran Windows CE, and I think it even had a browser on it. I even remember going out to look at "smartphones" in 2003, and later in 2005, and just being generally disappointed. The one that I looked at in 2003 was too expensive and clunky, (I was a college student on a budget,) and the one that I looked at in 2005 was too hard to figure out how to use. (Windows CE).
Ballmer's criticism of the first iPhone was that Microsoft had been shipping almost the same thing on phones with Windows CE for quite a few years. The big difference was the UI: The iPhone was a touchscreen and easy to figure out; Windows CE was difficult to figure out and used a stylus.
I remember it being huge that you could do that and pinch and zoom rather than use a d pad to walk around a bad render of a webpage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol#...
Post-iPhone that demarcation got muddled a bit by touch-driven UI and the occasional touchscreen feature-phone will be considered a basic "smartphone" by many, but in the historical context when that distinction still mattered it was all about the installables, and J2ME did not count.
PS: neighbor poster reminds us that the iPhone at first did not have user installable apps either, I guess that could be seen as muddling my demarcation line even more. But on the other hand the reality was that when it happened, the iPhone was so much a standout that nobody really cared where it would fit in the emerging field of mobile phone classifications, it was just The iPhone. And iirc "smartphone" as a term wasn't quite as established as we like to think it was, the conceptual bound were more clear than the name. When "smartphone" eventually emerged as the definitive shared superclass of iPhones and Android devices it inherited almost accidentally (and there's-an-app-for-that era Apple did not try too hard pointing out that inaccuracy...)
Mobile websites went through a phase where everything looked like iPhone menus for a while and that was often quite annoying because I was used to just reading normal web pages, even if they were often slow.
I think the iPhone made an important change in that it was significantly more powerful (and expensive!) than most phones people used. These devices were out there and they had been for years, but Apple normalised spending ever increasing sums of money on a phone.
On the Nokia side, Symbian S60 vs S40 indicated the distinction, with the former usually implying a ton of first-party features and a native SDK for apps that could offer functionality beyond the J2ME API limitations.
Windows Mobile also went through several revisions before we got to 2007. I believe Nokia had a few releases in the PDA form-factor as well, but the only real value-add there was being able to use webpages made for the desktop.
Many Palm OS devices came increasingly really close to a smartphone/iPhone concept and experience, especially when paired with a GPRS phone (over RS232, IRDA).
Handspring/Palm Treo (e.g Treo 180g) was probably the closest thing to the iPhone concept on many levels.
Had some Palm III, then a Sony Clié SJ30, and finally a Palm LifeDrive, when the iPhone was announced it felt like the most natural evolution (and actually with the first one two steps forward yet a step back because PalmOS had a wonderful app ecosystem)