The innovation and genuine new thing on the iPhone and the entire key to its success was the screen.

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”

You're not wrong but you're simply describing Apple's business model. Take technology that has matured and do it well.

If you ask me, Apple's main innovation with the iPhone was making the UI usable with just a finger instead of a stylus.

There were a lot of naysayers at the time around doing away with a physical keyboard led by all the Blackberry speed thumb typists. The criticisms weren't even wrong per se but they ultimately didn't win out against the tradeoffs--which were certainly aided by the maligned but very necessary aggressive autocorrect.

The first iPhone kind of sucked compared to the blackberrys of the day. They didn't even have copy and paste. It took a few iterations before the potential was unlocked.

I had a Treo and didn't switch to an iPhone until the 3GS. A lot of people remember the iPhone (and iPod) as these overnight successes--and they really weren't although they sold well enough. It was around the third or fourth generation that both really hit their stride. (As I recall iTunes didn't even run on Windows at first and Macs were systems used mostly by media professionals.)

Jobs initially wanted people to build web apps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vq993Td6ys&t=37s and the app store only became available for the second generation iPhone (which was called the iPhone 3G). The next year, the 3GS added HSDPA support which made online browsing pretty smooth. Combined with apps, it was finally ready for massive success.

I don’t think you’re wrong, yes all the individual technologies in the iPhone already existed, but there’s a bigger picture. The fact is the iPhone revolutionised hand held mobile computing, so given that fact it’s up to us to figure out how they did it and why it worked.

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.

Having a capacitive touch screen wasn’t the iPhone’s innovation, touch screens date back to the 1940’s, it was the browser, UI, and business model that was innovative.

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.

What was innovative about the browser that wasn't already available on Sony Ericsson phones with Opera Mini since 2005? The UI was a little different and polished but also not that new. I still don't get the hype. I had the original iPhone, found out it doesn't support apps and promptly went back to my Sony Ericsson.

Opera Mini at iPhone’s release couldn’t zoom in and out or show websites in a horizontal or vertical view etc. It also didn’t directly render websites requiring a server to provide a more limited version which caused a range of compatibility and latency issues etc.

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.

It definitely could zoom in any way you wanted, because otherwise the non-responsive desktop websites wouldn't be readable on the 240x320 display.

Opera Turbo was always disabled on my phone, never needed it. But I never used GPRS, only EDGE and later.

The sever didn’t provide the full sized images on large pictures, so you couldn’t zoom in the phone simply didn’t have that information.

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”

That was one of the reasons why I didn't use Opera Turbo at all.

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.

Back in those days extremely smooth scrolling and pinch-to-zoom was something that turned mobile web browsing from annoying hurdle to a fairly pleasant experience.

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.

>it was the browser, UI, and business model that was innovative.

You call it innovative, I call it draconian anti-consumer walled garden that needs to be eliminated

How exactly do you think that suggests the first iPhone wasn’t innovative?

There’s a reason why the LG Prada is remembered by precisely no-one other than people on message boards who say ‘well aktchully the iPhone wasn’t the first touch screen phone’.

And that’s because it was a terrible phone.