You have to put it in context with what passed for a smart phone back then. No web browser (they sort of existed but were extremely cut down and not really usable), small screens with limited software, very limited connectivity that was very expensive.

A valid criticism was the lack of physical keyboard, which phone-jockies found a deal breaker, but in all other ways a phone with decent apps, a large screen, a real web browser designed around and provided with unlimited internet connectivity was always going to be a hit.

It wasn't even that expensive compared to other phones.

I am sure someone with quibble that some other product technically had something similar first, and they are probably right. But the iPhone demo was the first time I had seen anything quite like it.

Turning on a light bulb, ordinary light in the house, meh, ok, then swipe your hands out over the counter and the recipe pulls up. That's the 'oh wow' moment. Then grab and throw a song to a Homepod connection. You know what I mean...

There's a gap someone can shoot, maybe 3 years tops. Honestly though, the developer ecosystem is just so tight, continuity so powerful, doing this solo requires more than what the whole MFi program offers.

At the time my feature phone had much better MMS, video calling, and J2ME apps. The first iPhone was a joke by comparison looked at through that lens, and detractors generally were looking at the fact it was this hobbled 2G device missing features that were common in other, cheaper phones. Oh, and the camera was absolute garbage, too.

MMS worked well enough but was/is pretty limited. Video calling existed but postage stamp video at 8 frames per second was not something that anyone wanted to actually use. And don't get me started on J2ME, an ecosystem so vast that Google didn't even bother to include it in Android even though they are both based on Java. Although other phones had better cameras, none took what we would call an acceptable photos today.

What people did use all the time was the browser and only the iPhone had a decent one. That was the only thing that mattered. Heck, the iPhone wasn't even a very good _phone_ and even that didn't matter.

I based my purchase of phones in the early to mid 00s on whether they came with the full Opera Mobile browser.

I could use just about everything online the same as desktop, that didn't rely on flash of course. The screen size was small but surprisingly wasn't a big issue as everything else was a massive improvement.

Oh Nokia 3660, how I loved thee. I actually chose the 3650 and then 3660 because they seemed to be the best smartphones at a standard sized. I just couldn't justify qwerty.

I definitely do not think that opinion was widespread. If anything I think that the biggest discussed shortcoming of the first iPhone was that it was only available on AT&T.

It didn't multitask, even though other pocket computers for a Long Time had at least the appearance of multitasking. It didn't have the ability to install any additional software, even though other pocket computers for a Long Time handled third-party software just fine. It didn't even have a copy/paste function, even though [WTF? Srsly, Apple?].

All of these things were eventually corrected by Apple, but it was pretty awful until they were corrected: For quite some time, the iPhone was just a rather fancy touchscreen music player with telephone and SMS programs tacked on.

(More damning: All of these things were corrected very quickly by third parties via jailbreaks. Some of us were having a ball with first-gen IOS devices very early on in the game, but Apple wasn't any help in getting that accomplished.)

And to take two of your examples, multitasking and 3rd party software, yeah, other pocket computers had them, and they generally sucked hard (see, Windows Mobile). Even the lack of copy/paste - other phones had them, but there was (and honestly still is) considerable debate over how it should be implemented given multitouch was new.

It seems like the Vision Pro 1 has the M2 so that when the Vision, or Vision Air comes out, it will be at least as powerful as the first Pro. And the Pro 2 can have the M3.

But from various PalmOS devices to whatever Android device is in my pocket right now, carrying wired headphones has never been a thing for me for whatever reason.

So as a Google Voice user since it was still called GrandCentral, having Google Voice available on a Wifi-connected touchscreen pocket music player called an iPod Touch was simply never very useful to me: The OG iPod Touch was lousy as a telephone, since it lacked all of the basic parts (like a microphone or an earpiece) that made telephones useful, and SMS was not yet in its heyday back then either.

I got much better use of the service with my dumb phone with T9 text input and transcription of voicemails to SMS, and my dumb phone worked anywhere instead of just where I could find a Wifi network.

Jailbroken, the iPod was an amazing pocket computer with a brilliant display, thin profile, and exceptional responsiveness to touch input, especially with third-party apps and improvements installed. It was fun having a real *nix userland installed on it, and it sure seemed novel to SSH from it.

By default, though? Almost useless except as a music player -- a task that previous iPods did better.

(I mostly used my OG iPod Touch to take offline notes. It did OK at this, but previously-used PalmOS devices did better in terms of input speed and portability of those notes.

Even relatively high-end aftermarket car stereos at the time were afraid of it: "Oh, why sure I can play music with your iPod!

Except.. is that an iPod Touch?"

"shun shun shun")

It had the only truly usable mobile web browser. Windows Mobile's IE was trash, and the browsers on Palm OS, Blackberry and Symbian were laughable. This was the killer app (especially on Wifi, EDGE was not great).

When trying to use the iPhone seriously, at some point it wouldn't receive calls anymore (just silently crash the deamon receiving it, you'd never know if not told by the caller afterwards), drop active calls when battery was too low (single digit), call quality could be horrible, stuff would crash from time to time.

Memory would leak like a sueve from everywhere so rebooting the phone every now and then was good hygiene. It's only after the 3GS that it stabilized, otherwise antennagate would have been just another tuesday IMO.

It was still a stellar device, but not a fully reliable device in any way shape or form.

Compared to all the smartphones of the time, it was a slow toy with no apps and a 2G connection that was completely worthless

It looked nice though, and eventually it got an app store (unnoficially first), and the overall UX was a clear winner (nobody believed touch screens would ever replace blackberry style devices!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone

> When Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007,[38] it was sold only with AT&T (formerly Cingular) contracts in the United States.[32] After 18 months of negotiations, Steve Jobs reached an agreement with the wireless division of AT&T[39] to be the iPhone's exclusive carrier. Consumers were unable to use any other carrier without unlocking their device.

I don't know how they did it, but "life finds a way" ?

> I didn’t even use my iPhone in the US

So you can't really describe the experience for the several different US carriers which it didn't work on, and thus can't really say it worked on any other network. Verizon was a network it didn't work on, and thus fails the "any other network" standard you set earlier.

It worked on any GSM network. Tmobile for instance. Verizon and Sprint were the exceptions in the US, since they weren’t GSM.

It is not being pedantic to point out someone is saying something massively untrue.

Your comment makes it sound like anyone could just easily take an OG iPhone and run it on any network, but in reality, to US consumers it was only a few smaller networks and only after breaking an expensive contract. See how that's more than just a pedantic difference?

Albeit not from the computer nerds who knew what they were getting, but the general public who thought they were buying a phone on par with the Motorola, Nokia or Panasonic phones in term of reliability.

It was incredible and obviously a game changer.

Also, it took over a year to be able to write apps for it.

JS Web apps were not “apps.”

Before Steve stood on that stage in 2007 and demoed the first iPhone, most people had never even seen 'swipe to scroll'. The first iPhone absolutely kicked the arse of everything else. So what if it was 2G that was how most phones were back then. The only objection anyone could think off (e.g. Ballmer) was that it was expensive.