What? Safari on your phone was mind blowing and immediately useful. Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.

> Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.

So it was even worse than I remember.

I... Think they were? I kinda remember having ICQ on it, but maybe that was already the iPhone 2. Or I'm hallucinating.

There were only built-in apps on release. Third party apps and the App Store came in the iPhoneOS 2.0 update.

Browsers were already commonplace in phones for years at that point. Maybe things were more dire in the US?

Browsers in other phones sucked. I'd owned high-end "smart" phones before the first iPhone and ultimately went back to a flip phone because they just weren't worth using. Usability of the first iPhone browser was a huge leap forward.

Ironically, that was largely because it let you more easily use sites built for desktop, due to the larger screen space and ease of pinch to zoom. Those older phones would have been somewhat more useful if mobile first/responsive sites had been a thing then, but it took the popularity of the iPhone for that to happen.

At the time you pretty much had palm and wince and feature phones. Of the three wince was probably the better of the interfaces (but that was a mater of taste). Data was expensive to buy on most carriers. Which all the other carriers mimicked within a couple of months of iPhone coming out. The iPhone was decently better than the other two and the 'unlimited data plan' and the bling bling of 'apple'. Also the browser being worth anything. The built in ones for all the others were junk.

Then people started sideloading and basically showed Apple they needed a store which they quickly came up with. Getting an application on the other two platforms at the time was mind numbingly bad (activesync was to put it mildly awful to use). In some cases you needed to get the carrier involved (better have a few months to validate and a few hundred thousand dollars to pay for it).

Also that screen they used was way better than what any other phone out there had at the time. Most of the top end phones needed a stylus and itty bitty keyboard to be any sort of useful.

I would say it was not until the droidx came out that anyone had anything that approached how cool the iphone was.

Mobile browsers were a painful experience before that. Mobile keyboards were a painful experience before that.

I think Blackberry was the only one that did both OK enough to take seriously. I know people loved the Sidekick, but I never used it and don't recall if people used a web browser on it, or just text messaging.

The first iPhone was more impressive than a Blackberry.

Most feature phone browsers were very limited compared to what Safari supported (almost the full web experience at the time). You'd have to look at other "smartphone" class devices for something comparable, and those were not common (EDIT: among consumers) in the US at the time.

We must have been on a completely different web. It was several generations later before they even began to approach the "full web experience"

> Also apps weren’t part of the original iPhone.

So it did even less than I gave it credit for.

You are completely ignoring the reality that Apple products are considered better than peer products even if they are objectively equal. The public doesn't care if Apple wasn't the first company to put a web browser on a phone. The public knows that they like their iPod, and the marketing for the iPhone made it compelling.

> the marketing for the iPhone made it compelling.

That's part of my point. There was a tremendous amount of hype for something that was incredibly limited and objectively bad. However eventually it became very good and took over the world.

I had a Motorola Q at the time and the first iPhone was light years beyond it, even if the only metric used to compare was browsing the internet. Most sites were barely functional in Windows Mobile IE.

But it had no apps, the analogy works, the iPhone did some things great (web browser:rewrite X in the style of y or whatever) and had some gotchas that seemed like a big deal at the time but were then resolved, or everyone realised it was so good they didn't matter (maybe no keyboard: hallucinations, we thought this was a problem but it's not, and no apps:no knowledge of current events, easy fix)

What are you referring to here? The iPhone didn’t have apps for over a year, until the same time as the iPhone 3G launch.

> the first iPhone, the first gen was bad even by the standards of the day

That's why it barely got over six million units sold.

Milli Vanilli also sold over 10 million records. Maybe popularity doesn't equal quality?

An iPod, a phone, an Internet communicator. Not so bad if you ask me.

the worst was it was ATT only and they had a coverage hole on the block where I lived so I had to get rid of it for something supported by verizon. didn't go back to an iphone until 10 years later.

My recollection was that AT&T was the only vendor that would provide free wifi with the iPhone (Apple precondition)

I'm not sure "bad" is fair. But the app ecosystem wasn't really developed, the network connectivity wasn't great, and there were probably a lot of other shortcomings especially in retrospect. I had a Treo at the time and didn't upgrade for a few years to the 3GS which, as I recall, was when the iPhone really took off.

The iPod had a somewhat similar trajectory. The first gen version was pretty much just another MP3 player and iTunes didn't even run on Windows at first.

No, because next word predictors are fundamentally limited in their capabilites and have interest problems. This isn't something you can just iterate on to fix. You need a different architecture.