Remember WAP[1] and WML[2], the HTTP and HTML substitutes for mobile phones too anemic/limited to support the real thing? Back then, many web sites simply didn't support access from a mobile device. (It's the polar opposite of "mobile first" or "mobile only".) A few did, but many just tossed up an error page.
With the iPhone, Apple put together all the key ingredients to be able to say, if you're on the go and suddenly need to access your bank's web site to check your balance or whatever, you will be able to, even if your bank doesn't support mobile devices. The experience may not be great, but it will at least be possible.
Those key ingredients included a big screen, a fast enough processor and large enough RAM to handle pages that were somewhat bloated, a browser that supported enough (JS, etc.) to make most pages work, and special features for making the most of desktop-oriented pages by zooming in on text. To some extent, Apple brought these key ingredients together by designing it that way, but they also did it by not entering the market until powerful enough hardware was available.
The iPhone flipped mobile web access on its head. Instead of implementing whatever was convenient and punting on 50+% of the web, leaving users at the mercy of web sites to decide if mobile access was worth it to them, Apple created a device and browser that took responsibility for doing anything and everything it could to make sites work.
The web is a killer feature for the internet, and getting meaningful access to the web was a killer feature for internet-connected mobile devices. Paradoxically, it worked so well that the platform was enormously successful and it became essential to offer mobile web support.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
Quite frankly, I still tend to think it's as much about Apple knocking it out of the park with the UX (and marketing), as it is about Microsoft doing literally everything wrong in response. WM could have become what Android is today.
But I agree also agree with you in that my own first iPhone was the iPhone 3G, and the 3G part and later the app store became a major thing for the device, whether it was browsing the web, or using internet-centered apps (chat, sms, reddit, etc.).
The KILLER feature is the total time to do something that the user intends to do.
If you have a very fast OS, but bad UX then the rate-limiting step is the UX, not the OS. And the converse is also true.
Having an expressive vocabulary and complex grammar is great for saying a lot quickly if they’re fluent but painfully slow for anyone who isn’t.
With this in place commerce could begin on the phone. Once everyone added mobile pay options it could end there as well. An now everyone has one, if they can.
However, I think you make a great point that the two are interrelated.
My straw man starting point would be: A poor user experience that is lightning fast can still be a great experience.
But a great user experience that lags or is slow will typically not be successful.
The iphone succeeded because it coupled a great user experience that was so fast that it felt like interacting with objects in the real world.
The iPhone won because it looked amazing and had the App Store. Looks and features. How did you reach the conclusion that it was speed?
Actually, that supports my point. The App Store came by because people wanted it. No one said: “oh no bloat my phone will slow down”.
It would help me at least if you could specify/ list what you think were the things in UX that made it so much better than Symbian phones.
We can think of things like slide to unlock but much more importantly scrolling. If something shows more the mastery of the iphone UX of that time it is definitely scrolling, who categories it as gesture now? It's completely normalized, on all other Platform of that time, you had to play with arrows and the scroll bar. Now every platform has it.
Using an iPhone felt like directly manipulating the underlying content. It was a qualitatively different experience that only superficially resembled previous touchscreen devices insofar as it used similar input hardware.
Note that Apple didn't invent the concept of a responsive UI thread with physics-based UI metaphors, for example Jeff Han demonstrated a fairly sophisticated example at TED2006[1] the year before. But to my knowledge the iPhone was the first mass-produced device with a direct manipulation interface.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th...
But in the case of iOS vs Symbian:
- as others said: capacitive touch screen (this is not an OS issue, but iphone was among the firsts to use it, definitely earlier than Nokia). This is huge. Like the thing that everyone was talking about (around me) when the original iphone came out is how you could swipe to see the pictures. And it wasn't just for paging, it defined how you could interact with the phone (think pinch zooming, and rotation - not sure when these were added).
- the touch screen UI itself. Nokia played around with the touch UI before, but never really liked it. It was expressed several times internally, that touch is just a no go. But no wonder: the resistive touch screen is pretty bad, but also Symbian itself was built on the assumption that all you have is keys while iOS was built with touch UI in mind from the very beginning. (Now, of course touch was added to Symbian, but that's just not the same. Or they didn't put in the effort. Nokia even had an experimental touch phone released to the market in 2003, the 7700[1], but it was mostly ridiculous.)
- the UI just was a lot more polished, looked better, classier, the graphics was better. They had OpenGL and probably a graphics accelerator - nothing like that in Symbian, of course. (It even took the android guys by surprise, I remember reading/hearing in an interview that when they saw a demo or the release, they've realized that they had to redo the UI from scratch. Because before that they had this Blackberry-ish/Symbianish idea, they thought they were competing with that.)
- I'm pretty sure it had a better browser.
And this pretty much defines the experience, the feel a user gets from the phone. It couldn't send or receive MMS-es (some people may have used it then, but most I guess just wanted to have the feature), it couldn't receive 'push' email. I.e. you had to manually refresh your inbox, emails didn't just arrive. It didn't even have apps. Symbian had all these. It has had these for years then. It even had an app store like thing (at least you had to send in your app for verification which would then be signed by Nokia or it couldn't be installed - that was a new thing around 2004-2006, something I think nobody really did before).
I'd argue the latter, but it could be a question of framing?
But you are right that the capacitive display itself makes the interaction faster because it's enough to touch while the resistive has to be pressed. So it's probably slower and feels like you have to put in more effort.
Sure, for many, iPhones are still preferred because of the low latency, so it matters, but I suspect the iPhone would've done just as well if the latency was bad. The competition was about finger vs keys/pencil, not latency.
It helps that the iPhone was a iPod with a phone attached, instead of a phone with a multi-use compute device attached.
OG iPods were single purpose music players, and features that made sense were slowly introduced over time (and were optional). Adding support for photo viewing made sense because album art is universal and well, album art is no different than a photo. Adding video made sense because you have this nice color screen for showing the photos/album art, and music videos are a thing people enjoy. Then adding a camera make sense, because you can already view photos/videos. Once you have all that in one package, adding phone capabilities makes a lot of sense when you realize that people are carrying around iPods along with a cellphone.
If we can consider the iPhone to be innovative, we cannot overstate how much timing was important.
The iPhone was a phone with a big screen optimized for the internet. Regarding people who are not into technology,for what I can see, their main interest to go for the smartphone has been whatsapp and free phoning in general. And as time went on, more and more services of all kind including administrative ones where more participial to use on the internet that in real life.
Any else have a PDA and see the glaring opportunity to add cellular functionality to them?
What iphone was a LOT better at than everyone else was UX. Of which speed is one component, of course. It's funny how much people never get it although it happened in front of us, it happened to us. At the time I was working at Nokia Research and I remember my girlfriend telling me how his boss got this wonderful phone that you can take photos with and you can view them, etc. The funny thing is that I had such a phone since 2001. I have been working with smartphones for 6 years then, she knew it, she listened to me when I told her or others what I was doing (and then listen to others responding "yeah, but phones are for making phone calls"). She saw me browsing the net on my phones (a 9210 communicator and then a 9500), send emails from the beach, etc.
Still it somehow didn't register. Because it looked like something that she'd never use. And then the iphone that did a lot less made her and basically everyone understand what a smartphone is. (Even though by then symbian smartphones were pretty common, most people didn't use them as smartphones.)
So no, it's not simply the speed. It's the UX. And even if we talk about speed, it's still not the speed, but it's the perception of the speed, which a lot has been written about: delay (lagging) matters a lot even if speed on average is OK.