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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

Name one pre-iPhone smartphone that you'd be willing to pit against the iPhone.

Oh, and Apple's vendor lock-in is still a damn sight better than the telco lock-in it replaced (in the US).

I guess you misread my comment. I was criticizing the comparison of feature phones with the iPhone not comparing iPhones with smartphones. It's a big difference. If the iPhone would have been the first smartphone you could probably call it revolutionary. But you can't. Evolution ok, Better as the competition at the time of release ok. I'll grant you that already. Still a big difference.

The first iPhone didn't even support 3rd party apps (and afaik in the beginning Steve Jobs never intended to support native apps). Other smartphones had native apps for ages, though.

People should just stop to pretend that apple invented phones with big screens, it's ridiculous.

Yep. I was using a Palm Treo smartphone four years before the iPhone came out. A solid phone, the Internet in my pocket, email on the go, and plenty of apps. The Palm app market went back to 1997, when the PalmPilot first came out. So as far as features and utility went, the iPhone looked kinda weak to me at launch.

I think the iPhone's main novelty in the market was that Apple invested heavily in consumer-friendly design and aesthetic appeal, and then they marketed the shit out it. They single-handedly dragged the smart-phone market across the chasm, just like they did with the MP3 player market. Brilliant and gorgeous work. But not in areas that I think are deserving of patent protection except when the R&D drives some deeper technical innovation.

This is a joke, right? Having used three different models of the Palm Treo and the Wince Treo, I can assure you I was desperate to use the iPhone because it just worked. Sure the Treo exceeded the original iphone on many different features, but none of them worked. The software was awful, it crashed all the time, you couldn't receive calls b/c the software would crash, none of the apps worked well, and the internet was completely unusable. It was a total nightmare.

Yes the iphone was shiny and beautiful, but it also worked! This "treo was awesome" straw man floats around alot until I actually ask them about it and then the whitewashed memories come flooding back and people step back and say, you're right, it was awful.

I like how you started this reply with a question and ended it with a statement. You've decided you know better than all other Treo owners and so now you can speak over them and overrule their decisions.

No.

This is not how civil discourse works, and for the record I owned Windows Mobile phones before the iPhone and while they were not as good as the iPhone or the HTC Dream or many competitors, they had rounded corners, a bezel, a rough multitasking framework, apps etc.

They were in every way a proto-iPhone, and the idea that the iPhone did anything but promote smartphones to the average person is hilarious.

I think you're judging pioneers by the standards of later arrivals. It would seem terrible now, but compared to the options then, I was very happy. Internet! In my pocket!

I do think the PalmOS was showing its age at the time, and a bad app or extension could cause a lot of trouble. But having used PalmOS for years, getting things reasonably stable wasn't hard for me. And as a nerd, I'm pretty tolerant of crashes.

So no, it's not a joke. The Treo was a solid nerd smartphone for me.

Yeah fair enough, I just know that I could never get the internet to be useful. The email in my pocket was OK, but the Blackberry did it much better. The Apps were trying, but they just couldn't quite get there. I remember the whole frustration of the experience was because the Treo was so close to being a nice phone and yet literally so far away from being there. I was also an original Handspring user, so very familiar with the PalmOS, but that was another major annoyance - nothing had changed since my Handspring in 2001! Sigh.

exactly

Nobody are claiming Apple invented phones with big screens. But you have to be pretty blind to not see that iPhone was a revolution in the smartphone market, which had barely seen any user interface innovation in 10 years prior to that.

I'm pretty sure this was a patent infringement lawsuit, so the statement that the "iPhone was a revolution" is irrelevant. Apple won a claim against Samsung for mimicking "bounce back" behavior among other patents.

Hopefully pull-to-refresh isn't patented. I'm not about to look either lest I be found willfully infringing.

Pull to refresh is patented by Twitter, and Apple has bought a license (apparently, since it'll apparently be implemented in iOS 6).

>Apple won a claim against Samsung for mimicking "bounce back" behavior

False. Patents don't cover features. Patents cover inventions. Apple won against samsung for copying apple's solution for how to implement a feature. Not for having that feature.

This misrepresentation trivializes the nature of the patents and is ideologically driven. Don't fall for it.

If you disagree, try reading the patent.

I'll check it out. I remember seeing a number of patents involved in the case, just haven't read them. My comment was certainly a generalization.

Yeah initially it wasnt made to support 3rd party apps he expected everyone to innovate on the web. That's why they concentrated so much on making Safari great. All the developers wanted native apps and eventually it brought the app store to life.

> Name one pre-iPhone smartphone that you'd be willing to pit against the iPhone.

The iphone was not a smartphone when it was released. It lacked the ability to install ANY third party software. It was essentially a very snazzy feature phone.

Its success did not come due to its smartphone credentials, which are still heavily inferior to its competition. It's wholly owned to its design and usability.

> Name one pre-iPhone smartphone that you'd be willing to pit against the iPhone.

Any phone that let you install your own applications.

...not to mention Jobs with his extreme willingness to control everything, was initially against any third party apps. His vision was: you buy this device, here are the set of app, go and have fun. thats it. Its only after Cydia getting traction he changed his mind...

http://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-de...

> Name one pre-iPhone smartphone that you'd be willing to pit against the iPhone.

The TARDIS.

Your move.

The LG Prada : December 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

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