That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone. Smartphones of the day either resembled the iPhone or they resembled the blackberry but both designs were out there in number. After the iPhone was released almost everyone dropped their blackberry-like designs (except for RIM).

Apple's innovation was the capacitive multi-touch screen and finger-friendly interface. I'm not even sure that's a revolution just an evolution of existing designs.

Ah, here we are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg

The iPhone is a fine product. The ground it broke was making people want a PDA, not actually inventing the PDA.

http://www.gsmarena.com/palm_treo_180-623.php

Palm OS looks a lot like iOS when you factor in the era's technology.

So, as a Palm "Fanboy" I can say with certainty that those devices were not even in the same product category as the iPhone. Suggesting that they looked like iOS is farcical at best. I recall struggling for the better part of a week to purchase and install a "Yahtzee game" for the phone. Even after nine months on the 600, I _still_ was unable to reliably hit the proper key sequence to dial a number out of my phone book (the Cancel had the focus by default, so you would "select number, hit enter - and cancel out. Instead you had to "Select number, change focus, _then_ hit number to dial. They finally reversed it on the 700, screwing up 18 months+ of muscle memory that finally developed.

net-net - anybody who ever owned a Palm, and particularly those who used the browser, will state beyond a shadow of a doubt the iPhone and Palm had no relationship, evolutionary or otherwise, to each other.

Did the iPhone do the things my Treo could do much, much better? Was it a great step forward? Absolutely. The iPhone was and is amazing [1]. Nevertheless, saying that the iPhone stands apart from the broader evolution of mobile devices is either ignorance or a willful misreading of the relevant history.

[1] Though I will admit to finding the idea of paying money for ringtones of music you already owned a repugnant step back.

I think most people would agree that the iPhone 4S is an evolutionary upgrade over the original iPhone. Indeed, many, many of the Enhanced Browser/No Keyboard/App Store Enabled/Touch Screen smartphones today are closely related to the iPhone in a manner that that iPhone is not related to the Palm Treo - that's all I'm trying to say - that Apple did something completely new with the iPhone, rather than just iterating on a previous design.

I will _never_ forget the day I used the iPhone of a friend (I was among those who thought the concept of Apple getting into the "Phone" business was ludicrous, and was determined not to get one) - and used that browser/map. Within 48 hours I had an iPhone, and never looked back on my dear Treo.

Just because a particularly successful combination of traits looks like a giant leap doesn't mean it is (consider things like Nobel Prize winners or Olympic medalists born to "ordinary" parents). Similarly, the relationship of the iPhone to its predecessor phones is tighter than you think. Almost all of the traits that made the iPhone what it is were present in the predecessor population of smartphones.

In particular, I'd say the iPhone is what you get if you cross two specific devices and add the mutation of capacitive multi-touch (and the inevitable march of Moore's Law, of course). Those two devices are:

1. the O2 XDA (full touch screen, no keyboard, "enhanced" browser with desktop-like ambitions [even if it was Pocket IE]) 2. the Danger Hiptop (consumer focused device with similar built-in apps, centralized app download catalog / store)

Those ancestors were chosen quite carefully, of course. The manufacturer of the O2 XDA was HTC. A bunch of ex-Danger people (most notably Andy Rubin) went on to start Android. A smartphone cross in the iPhone's immediate vicinity was going to happen regardless.

The Treo was the original smartphone. The orignal smart phone that Blackberry copied was the Treo.

Apple's spin was ditching the keyboard, but by then even the sony ericcson P800 had a full screen phone with a touch keyboard years before apple.

http://www.google.ca/search?&q=sony+ericcson+p800

Apples spin wasn't ditching the keyboard as so many people think, it was designing the user interface around finger-based touch, making the interface easy enough for normal people to use, and finally to ship a decent performing browser at a time when most other phones were a nightmare to use when browsing the web (try a N95, also released in 2007, to see what I mean)

I forgot about the communicator because I didn't consider it a smart-enough phone to use. I kept using my Palm Pilot Pro becuse it gave me the productivity I needed. The communicator definitely had a keyboard and apps though, I just didn't find them usable at the time.

By far it is still one of the most bad ass looking phones, with that folding out.

On a side note, the Handspring Visor Phone addon is also worthy of a shoutout, since it was out before the Treo..

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Handspring_Releases_V...

but it was a niche product that probably didn't appear in the u.s. much.

as a psion user i lusted after these devices. but price of mobile data put them out of my reach.

i used a psion 5 as my main computer till 99 when i wanted to start ripping cds for an mp3 player amongst other things.

Fair enough, but now you're describing evolution, not revolution.

Which of course is the whole point: ideas are items of trade. Someone thinks of something and someone else improves it. That's the way innovation works. Apple has surely done more of it than any other single company, but they've also, like everyone else, "stolen" far more than they invented themselves.

Claiming that they have some special ground with the iPhone is just a laughable, juvenile flame war. I wish these would stop.

Back in 2007 I joined a new employer. One evening during my new hire training a colleague demo'ed his iPhone he brought over from America to Europe. All other attendees, including myself, were amazed about the multitouch, pinch and zoom photo's, the easiness of use, the awesome GUI and the beautiful design. At the end of the demo there was a deep respectful silence by all of us. Amazement. Thinking about our own phones at the time compared to what we just saw.

Then.. the owner of the iPhone put it gently against his face and caressed it. Yes he actually caressed it. I still remember that image.

This is the "thing". You know, this thing called love. Something that cannot be traded like an item and which still holds true for many.

before thi ihone, no app store no multi touch, litte integration outside of the blackberry, and smartphones and phones in general sucked by comparison. how quickly we forget how crappy what we had before was. sure, previous products had lots f features............ but they didnt blowpeoples minds, or make their companies the most valuable ever.

We're not forgetting that they sucked. We're pointing out Apple didn't invent this stuff.

Touchscreens, had those for years. Multi-touch? Lots shown in the ARS article. Here's some http://tactiva.com/demo.html. Includes pinch to zoom, 2 finger rotate objects. Also includes tactile feedback, something no tablet has introed yet AFAIK.

Apps, had those too for years. Oh look, it's instructions from 2001 on how to write apps for phones http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-Cupertino/1621/

App stores? Did you ever bother to look? There's been app stores since at least 2001. None of them were that popular but they did exist.

Oh look, my WinCE box boots into a grid of icons in 2001 http://blog.greggman.com/japan/ce/dsc03224.jpg

Maps, I had 3d first person maps on my 2004 feature phone, something still missing from any iPhones I know of. They had 2d maps in 2000

Games, Yep, last 5 phones I owned before my iPhone all had downloadable games. Here's me playing mappy I just purchased from an online app store in 2001 http://blog.greggman.com/blog/what_s_this_/

Cameras? Here's pictures from my 2001 cellphone camera http://blog.greggman.com/blog/pictures_from_cell_/

Facetime? Here's Facetime on a P2101V from 2001 http://blog.greggman.com/blog/more_cellphone_madness/

Front and back cameras? 2002 http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2002/11/15/my-new-p504is.html

Airtime, i.e. TV playback? 2003 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XWLG-6qPwo

Webpage browsing? Yep. Wrote my first blog post from a phone in 2001. Maybe Apple can claim full browsing first on iPhone though I suspect people have earlier examples. I could certainly view full pages through Opera Mini before iPhone.

Music? Several of the phones I owned has music stores built in and some phones advertised how awesome a movie player they were. Synced to PC and everything.

Want an iPad? How about the Sony Airboard, 2001. Wireless internet browsing touchscreen tablet http://www.sony.jp/airboard/indexpc.html

Did Apple take all those features and make them super awesome? YES.

The point is THEY TOOK EXISTING FEATURES. They didn't invent them. They just made them way better. Awesome. It's the little details they did well. It's the sum of the parts. It's pretty hard to pick any one thing for which there is no precedence. Cut and Paste? old. Zoom under pointer? Old. Slide to Unlock? Old. Email? Old. Pages of icons? old. They brought awesome style and design but even my old B/W WinCE machine linked above I didn't need or use any of the buttons except POWER and I could use my finger to control everything else.

I wonder what Andy Rubin would say about that...

Which phones?

This is pretty close to the one I owned around 2002: http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2002/04/04/comparison_of_six_...

Do you have specific smartphones in mind? The only ones of that era I'm more than passingly familiar with are the Palm phones, and they were nothing at all like the iPhone.

http://files.myopera.com/Yorch/blog/p800.jpg

Palm smartphones were the minority (in terms of total number of models).

Which is exactly why it resembled none of the smartphones that preceded it. That innovation was a monumental game changer.

The Nokia 770 from 2005/11 and the N800 which was released (2007/01) around the same time that Jobs was announcing the development of the iPhone. (These were Internet tablets with the hints of the telephony stack already included. Eventually the N900 phone did come out, too little too late unfortunately.)

Android has much more in common with Maemo than Apple iOS.

(And at the time, the 770 had a pretty amazing screen and user interface compared to most other mobile devices. If only Nokia had known that capacitive touchscreens existed and started porting the Hildon UI to multi touch in 2005..)

Aspects of Android were inspired by the iPhone. The iPhone itself was inspired by the Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile series of devices before it.

There really is no such thing as "stolen" when it comes to knowledge. Everything is built upon other things, emerging from the context where they are conceived. It is utterly impossible to not "steal" when you create because your creations are a direct response to the environment in which you create them, which by necessity is a result of creations that came before.

Apple "advocates" always said: apple invented the gui, apple invented mp3 players, apple makes the fastest PC, apple's not the "big brother" company, etc. etc. Every claim usually turns out false. The Rep for "reality distortion field" has firm basis in trugth.

We can't always take Apple's claims at face value. This article just exposed, once again, another pro-Apple fallacy: that they own mini-tablet-phones and everyone stole the idea from them.

nonsense.

Apple made the GUI, MP3 players, etc. usable for the general public.

Apple "advocates", including some in this very thread, do routinely dismiss as unimportant, sucky, etc. every pre-Apple contribution in some of these categories (especially smartphones and tablets). I generally think they're trying to emphasize the importance and originality of Apple's contribution, but I can see how someone else might interpret that as saying "Apple invented X".

This video describes very well how inventions get created and then evolve for the benefit of everyone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq5D43qAsVg

Palm was making touchscreen smartphones before iPhone.

Years before the iPhone I was carrying around an iPaq. Now it isn't quite the same, most notably because the original device didn't even function as a phone. Yet I would argue that the phone part of smartphone is by far the least important part (and the only reason it is so prevalent is that carrier subsidization allows people to stomach $700 iPhones). Really these things are ultra-portable computers and the phone thing is ancillary.

The iPaq wasn't multitouch. But here's the thing -- Apple bought that multitouch sensor. They didn't invent it. They didn't specify it. They didn't even initiate its creation. Their software used it brilliantly, but by the common narrative you'd think they had invented it.

Capacitive touchscreens evolved. Embedded processors evolved. GPUs evolved. Wireless technologies evolved. Batteries evolved. Makers like RIM pushed much of that evolution.

Apple stepped in at the perfect confluence of technologies and made the iPaq v2.0. Better in every way -- largely owing to those hardware improvements, all of which came from outside Apple -- but did it really invent an industry?

It's actually a bit sad how little credit RIM gets, given that they were the ones who pushed a lot of the innovation in mobile that made the iPhone possible. A distributed messaging, application platform, camera, etc...everyone just focuses on the damn keyboard as if it defines the platform.

Already I'm seeing many ascribing the iPad as inventing the tablet, forgetting so many products that came before (both real, such as Archos, and conceptual like the Crunchpad). Apple executes amazingly well, but their creations are seldom as out of left field as people imagine. They say that the victors write history, but it is sad if we're blinded into confusing commercial success with innovation.

Do you think that was only because those devices lacked a capacitive touchscreen? If so, then why did every other company have to scratch their mobile platform after the iPhone came along? Why didn't Microsoft make Metro in 2006, after all, the techology was available (I tried a Panasonic Toughbook with a capacitive display way before that).

I agree that others should be credited for their inventions. Both RIM and others like Nokia helped pushed the technology forward, but they did so very gradually. It took an outsider to disrupt the industry (luckily, Apple had killed off the Newton, or they probably woudn't have had the incentive to do so).

Besides everything being touch based, which was really disruptive, I believe a real disruption in the iPhone was that it included a full browser and not the mobile crap that existed back then, apps were good, but it was something that existed in other smartphones although without the centralized distribution medium, but they did exist.

Now some people are saying that Apple reign will not last just because smartphone prices will follow the same path that feature phones prices walked in the last 10 years, they will become much cheaper than now, I do not know about Apple remaining the leader or not but I do believe that smartphone prices will be really cheap in 2020, even for developing nations.

EDIT: typo and correction in the last paragraph.

For those right choices Apple has yielded incredible riches: Profits never before seen, quarter after quarter. They're a half-a-trillion dollar company.

All I argue about is this revisionist history that acts, essentially, like Apple is entitled to everything. That they borrowed nothing and created everything. It seems like I'm arguing against a strawman there, but it is too common of an opinion. It is an argument that is based upon taking the smallest trivia of Apple's implementation and making it the most profound, important thing ever, while everything else doesn't matter.

History of their company in making such products automatically creates a media hype around the products. Its like so long as products are not very bad, they are always good. And assumed to be so! They have done a lot of work to make that happen and deserve it too.

Don't forget that iPhone and iPad got the push because iPod generation of devices did a very good job convincing common folks that handheld devices can be usable. Again apple needs to be credited for this.

Android can be told to have copied iPhone's trend. Not as a product.

As you said others have done a better job building ecosystem to ensure such an innovation happens.

And isn't the iPaq v1.0 just the Newton v2.0?