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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

When the first iPhone came out it was ludicrously bad compared to a current Blackberry. No copy/paste, no multitasking between apps, email wasn't in landscape mode, I mean I could go on.

So it's pretty clear that iPhone won because of two factors, exclusivity/eyecandy, and the other manufacturers didn't try hard enough to catch up.

Because for productivity the iPhone was just pure garbage when it came out, and for several years.

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Completely disagree. You're just listing features and assuming they're all equivalent (e.g., 7 features is better than 5 features). What the iPhone got right was that it was actually intuitive for a regular person to use—it didn't feel like a business/work tool that you had to learn to use because you were forced to. Copy/paste, multitasking, and landscape mode weren't important for a v1 device aimed at the average consumer. What mattered was the overall ease of use, which can't be reduced down to a single feature.

The lack of those features made it very difficult to use for an advanced business user, of course that wasn't Apple's audience in the beginning.

Sure, but eye candy/exclusivity were certainly not the dominant reasons the iPhone succeeded. The early iPhones were $299 with 2-year contracts—definitely not prohibitively expensive for a huge number of people. Eye candy…sure the iPhones looked good compared to the competition, but there was nothing stopping the competition from making good looking phones too.

I had an iPhone 3G for about 6 months and then got a job that came with a BB. I though ok, everyone raves about how good it is for email, this will be interesting.

It was ghastly. The email and messaging UI was a mess, the physical keyboard was an instrument of torture. IIRC it had a settings app and a configuration app, and they flipped a coin what to put into which buried under two Byzantine menu structures. It had a lot more ‘features’ but they were all awful.

The iPhone did a lot less, but it did all of it easily and beautifully. The only think with the first two ones was they were so sluggish. The 3GS was wonderful just because it was half as slow.

They won because their browser wasn’t hot garbage. Blackberry browser was so limited, android was not great and iPhones come along with a browser that was almost equivalent to a desktop experience.

By the time iPhone 4s came out it was a viable option for enterprise.

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