Of course, the smartphone has been a relatively recent invention when you consider the timeline of the history of phones. With the telephone being invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell, the world was forever changed as people could talk to each other by voice from a long distance instead of having to rely on the previous form of long-distance communication: the telegraph, which forced you to learn morse code in order to communicate with someone. During the latter part of the 20th century, there was a surge in the introduction of more mobile phones, but these phones were often bulky and unwieldy, like the Motorola DynaTAC. These phones progressively got better, like with the IBM Simon which was a tad less bulky, had a touchscreen (you had to use a stylus, though), along with some built-in apps for tasks like setting reminders and checking your mail.
However, the first real, modern smartphone was the first iPhone created by the late Steve Jobs and Apple in 2007. This new piece of technology looked years ahead of the competition: it had a much larger screen and was able to do tasks that most people thought were only possible on a computer such as using a fully-functional browser. Although compared to today’s standards it’s missing some of the core features we take for granted, it was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. For one, instead of having a physical keyboard taking up half of the front side of the phone, Apple engineered a touchscreen display that would take care of most of the input. This allowed for the device to revolutionize the phone industry because a larger, more capable screen allowed for users to be able to use their phones for tasks that they would normally have to go to their computer for since the previous phones just weren’t great at complex tasks.
Even though now we think that the iPhone was a great thing and that Apple did well to introduce it to the market, that was not the general opinion back when it was first revealed. For example, Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft at the time, said that Apple had absolutely no chance of taking a significant market share. Others were skeptical of the iPhone’s capability, stating that there was no way it would be able to do the things Apple advertised effectively and that it was just a lot of hype for no good. Apple soon smashed most of these arguments by selling 1.9 million iPhones in 2007 which contributed to Apple’s $1 billion revenue in 2008. This trend has obviously not ceased as Apple has been relying on their iPhone sales to reach over $1 trillion net worth they have today.
Sources:
https://sciencenode.org/feature/How%20did%20smartphones%20evolve.php
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/29/the-story-of-the-original-iphone-that-nobody-thought-was-possible
https://time.com/3137005/first-smartphone-ibm-simon/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/29/what-did-critics-say-about-the-iphone-in-2007/
Great post! I wanted to look more into the reception of the original iPhone. Although there was some criticism by those like Steve Ballmer, in general, the reception was superb. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both praised the device for its revolutionary software. Additionally, Time ranked it as the top invention of the year in 2007. The main reason why there was some hesitancy to give the phone praise was that the speed of the network it was using was poor, and the phone originally could not connect to 3G services. However, it is clear the massive success of the phone today is in large part due to the excellent praise and nature of the original iPhone back in 2007.
ReplyDeleteSource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)