The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the LG Prada. Of course, resistive touch screen phones existed for a long, long time before that.
Sony Ericsson Liveview, MOTOACTV, the Pebble watch, even the Samsung Galaxy Gear predates the Apple Watch.
As always, downvotes are welcome but where I am wrong?
But you’re just seeing the screen 1 dimensionally yes capacitive screens existed but when I say the “iPhone screen” is why it was a success I mean the technology (capacitive) + the interaction design (momentum scroll and pinch to zoom) + heavy optimization (jerky scrolling was unacceptable, every interaction had to move exactly with the finger, even browser redrawing was decoupled from the scroll to enable this).
All these parts together in unison and to a high level of polish is what made that product magical and a success.
On the other hand the LG Prada devs and designers just had jerky scrolling and no one on the team said “this isn’t good enough”
If you ask me, Apple's main innovation with the iPhone was making the UI usable with just a finger instead of a stylus.
The reason Apple’s success at product development is so hard is that it involves orchestrating many, many different technologies together to create a powerful set of capabilities accessed through a consistent seamless user experience. That’s not a simple thing to even describe or discuss, let alone understand. It’s why they take years to develop products, and are almost never first in a new category, such as smart watches as you say.
That said, the LG Prada beat the iPhone to market by a month but the iPhone was in development for longer. What’s really interesting is the LG Prada II included a physical keyboard showing they where backing away from the design rather than doubling down.
Opera Mini was well optimized for cellphones of the time and bandwidth limited cellphone plans, but Apple’s deal with AT&T to allow unlimited bandwidth flipped a lot of those design decisions on their head. IMO what really separated the iPhone’s browser was a larger screen + better UI + better rendering + unlimited bandwidth meant it could just be used to casually browse the web.
Opera Turbo was always disabled on my phone, never needed it. But I never used GPRS, only EDGE and later.
The iPhone was released June 29, 2007 but announced in January. “On 7 November 2007, Opera Mini 4 was released. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, the entire code was rewritten.[28] Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similarly to a desktop based browser by introducing Overview and Zoom functions, and a landscape view setting. In Overview mode, the user can scroll a zoomed-out version of certain web pages.[29] Using a built-in pointer, the user can zoom into a portion of the page to provide a clearer view”
Hmm, perhaps I had a beta version of that. I definitely had it before the iPhone came out. Or it might have been a different browser? Not sure.
Mobile hardware wasn't capable of delivering such smoothness. Apple's innovation was to prioritize UI rendering over everything else. When you're zooming, rendering stops and browser only deals with zooming. Regardless of current CPU capabilities and load, scrolling and zooming is always smooth. And turns out people care about those way more than parallel rendering.
That's some underappreciated outside of the box thinking.
You call it innovative, I call it draconian anti-consumer walled garden that needs to be eliminated
And that’s because it was a terrible phone.
I’m confused by your comment. Android pioneered a good 80% of the modern smartphone UX. Apple makes nice phones but they are pretty much always late mover.
Their Pixel line hasn't dominated the market by any means, but has also done well enough that they can at least claim to some extent that they don't "need" the other manufacturers. Of course they do, but they can use "whatever, we'll just make $COOL_THING a Pixel exclusive and leave you behind" a threat with teeth. They actually do sometimes make features Pixel exclusive (sometimes just for a limited time), and that seems to be working out ok for them.
Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning, but I'd wager these days they've also clawed back most of that control. If Apple tells their customers, "we wanted to give you this cool new feature, but Verizon wouldn't let us", that will not go well for Verizon.
So I do agree that there's some compromise, and Google (and Apple) don't get to do literally anything they want, they are in a much better position to control their ecosystems and dictate terms than they were back when they started.
What concessions would those have been? The way I recall it, Apple in the early iPhone years would always favor retaining control over the phone experience over carrier reach, so they were available on very few carriers initially (especially compared to Android), but would not make concessions to them. Eventually, iPhones became a must-have item for carriers, so they all signed on under Apple's terms — and nowadays, unlocked phones are mostly the norm anyway.
Making sure the other guy loses isn’t great motivation to do anything. Especially once the “other guy” has lost. Google isn’t especially excited by OS, because their bread and butter is all in the cloud they just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake. It’s always looked at through the lens of how it will help advertisers and since the zeitgeist for the last few years has been about privacy as it relates to personal devices, they can’t really “innovate” much without hurting their core business.
I worked in Google consumer hardware and yes this is how it is. Quite a few motivated and talented people, for sure, but organizationally it just ended up being "copy Apple and/or Amazon's roadmap."
There are whole product areas at Google whose entire existence boils down to "everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
And the rest of it: "Ok, we killed Microsoft here, now what?" "Eh... whatever."
Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.