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Comment by david_draco | Hacker News Reader

That there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.

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I owned those devices. They were really bad, so I think it's fair to say that. There's a reason we kept calling everything else a potential iPhone killer, and forgot them all.

100%

The day I picked up the first iPhone I was carrying a Blackberry, a flip phone and an mp3 player. Really interested to hear what you're thinking of that was an equivalent product.

when the iphone originally came out, this was absolutely true. the way it handled rendering the desktop versions of pages alone, w/ the double-tap-to-zoom put it in its own tier beyond the blackberries / n-gages / etc. contemporaneously extant. beyond that, it was clearly just a better ux on existing tech, i’ll give you that.

It also had a large capacitive touchscreen rather than one with a stick and a keyboard underneath, impossibly smooth scroll inertia, a MEMS gyroscope for automatic landscape mode, etc. The GUI was also optimized for the capacitive touchscreen with large buttons everywhere. Android prior to the iPhone did look more like a BlackBerry.

(One could mention however that the iPhone initially didn't come with UMTS, which was already standard at the time for higher tier phones that did cost substantially less than the very expensive iPhone.)

What were they?

It's not a lie. All you need to do is watch the unveiling.

The most important bit (and reason it's not a lie) is when Jobs demoed scrolling.

"So... here i have all my songs... how do i scroll? I just... take my finger, and swipe".

You can hear the crowd visibly gasp. Every product before was arrow-keypad based and was not designed for touch. Plus it didn't have a desktop level OS, plus the capabilities of a desktop level OS. There was no equivalent.

There were plenty of phones with touchscreens before the iPhone. They were crap, with mostly resistive touchscreens, but they existed.

I had a rebranded version of this: https://www.gsmarena.com/qtek_s200-1417.php

My office-mate had one of these a little later: https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_ke850_prada-1828.php

(Fun fact: after playing with the Prada phone and seeing how awful it was, we wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the CEO of LG applying for roles in their phone development team, which we actually posted to South Korea. Months later, we received a reply from someone in the UK office of LG, denying our application, and not showing any sign of getting the joke.)

I miss my Treo :(

You only think you miss your Treo, our minds really put a glow on memories.

The Treo was great and was definitely possible to read webpages on it. I thought it was the best smart phone at the time. The screen size web browsing and email were all better on the iPhone.

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