These days the smartphone doesn't fill me with awe anymore the same way many earlier and even subsequent inventions still do.
It's possibly because I could carry on quite easily without a smartphone. The greater loss would be for me to live without a mobile phone (of any variety), a computer, or a portable music player.
Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?
I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?
It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.
> I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?
Feature phones ("dumbphones"), even ones with cameras or music player functionality, were and are extremely limited compared to smartphones like the Palm Treo, which was basically a pocket-sized, wireless internet-connected computer with a much larger, color screen, OS and GUI, installable apps, and a tiny (but usable) keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo
Phones using DoCoMo's i-mode (which took off in Japan starting in 1999) were sort of a bridge between feature phones and smartphones. i-mode will finally shut down in 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
Smartphones also generally looked very different pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.
> "What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties," DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."
https://www.engadget.com/2013-12-19-when-google-engineers-fi...
Oh, thanks, I got my history the wrong way round!
No, the iPods that were like iPhones (iPod Touch) were after the iPhone, not predecessors. The main iPod at the time of the iPhone introduction ("iPod Classic") had a small, non-touch screen in the top area of the face (except, most of the face taken up by the physical "click wheel" control, and a hard disk for storage, and other immediately pre-iPhone iPod's were basically scaled down versions of the same design (with Flash memory on, IIRC, the Nano and Shuffle, and no screen on the Shuffle.)
Listen to the audience reaction when he shows how you scroll a list view: https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?si=OmbgSG7nmEpdAETl&t=970
Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.