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Comment by aussieguy1234 | Hacker News Reader

It's also interesting that, prior to the iPhone, no one would have thought that phones would disrupt the PC market.

There's some revisionism here: having the internet in your pocket anywhere you went was a clear upgrade. Projecting a screen on your palm with low resolution was a clear downgrade.

Disruption is incredibly difficult but this product was giving off Juicero vibes from the start.

That might also be because iPhone happened to coincide exactly when 3G mobile broadband internet became available.

Pre and post 3G mobile broadband were different worlds.

It absolutely was on the ragged edge of viable. In the first one (and 3G) you could easily scroll a webpage faster than it could render it.

But it did what it needed enough to be extremely compelling. And it improved very fast in the early years.

I remember streaming Pandora in summer of 2008 and thinking how amazing is it that I can listen to whatever music I want on the go. And it got better and better by the week, it seemed. I don’t recall ever having issues with insufficient bandwidth, almost everything I expected to work, worked when I needed it to (in NYC).

It wasn’t long before we had Maps, Latitude, Yelp, Four Square, Twitter, so many possibilities due to combo of camera + mobile broadband + GPS + battery technology to allow on the go computation and communication.

3G smartphones (mostly Nokia N60 platform) were a thing from about 2002 in some European markets, with rather limited uptake. The real killer feature of the iPhone, at least initially (remember the first one didn't have 3G in any case) was a browser that didn't make you want to throw the thing out the window in frustration every time you used it.

The iPhone was pleasant to use, or at least not actively infuriating. That was, to a large extent, all it took.

Nokia really messed up, here; there was nothing stopping them making an iPhone-ish thing (perhaps without multitouch) a few years previous to the iPhone coming out, and there was even a semi-decent third party browser for their platform (Opera) which they could have taken cues from or bought, but they were always far more excited about the featurephone market, seeing smartphones as a niche.

3G connectivity was available for several years before the first iPhone launched. I had 3G phones in the US in 2005.

iPhone was late to the 3G game. It was one of the complaints of the original iPhone, that it didn't have 3G despite so many other devices out there already having it.

I don’t remember anyone using mobile broadband though, is it possible the networks weren’t ready for high usage in the earlier years? All people were doing is checking email and BlackBerry messenger texting.

I guess it could also have have just been a superior business strategy to compel ATT to offer unlimited data so that people could freely explore the possibilities without worrying about overage charges.

I used my phone for USB tethering a good bit on the go. I also had a version of Google Maps in 2005ish timeframe on 3G. I would often be able to stream music from internet mp3 and aac streams. I also had Opera Mini in 2005 over 3G internet.

It was only like $15/mo for unlimited data to add to my dumb phone plan. I didn't use the free dumb phone with the plan, I just popped the SIM into other devices.

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