Before Apple came up with iPhone, I had a freaking Ericsson brick thingy. None of Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung were innovating. None of those old, non original ideas were in any of those devices. Nokia had a webkit browser with a ridiculous cursor that you operated with that joystick thingy. I'm glad that Apple actually pushed them forward.
So yes, I think Apple has original products and they are innovating.
I use Apple everything. I love Apple products. But to say there wasn't any innovation happening before it in the phone sector misses some really cool things.
PS. I would pay all the money in the world for an updated P1i, same qwerty rocker keyboard, capacitive 3" touchscreen @ 720p running Android. One can dream, right?
There's a big difference between a good concept and a good execution of a concept. Apple have always been brilliant at execution, even if they don't have many original concepts (they don't do basic research). Is it not innovative to take a good idea and execute it better than anyone before? I find that a hard thing to dismiss. However, now that they are on top of the world, it would be nice to see them invest in open basic research to give back to the community where they got all their ideas and technologies from, like microsoft does with microsoft research.
RE giving back to the community; FreeBSD, CUPS, WebKit, LLVM and Clang to name a few. Notice I haven't claimed that any of these were directly invented by Apple, but all have varying levels of investment and contribution from Apple.
This is all out there on the internet. It takes a couple of seconds to look up with whatever search engine fits in with your ideology.
I agree that Apple's UX was a significant advance. (See this 2007 review talking about "paradigm-shifting interface"
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/iphone-review-part-1-hard... )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9h...
Steve comments again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnkXa3eTV88
The Mac's 30th anniversary a few weeks gave the original Mac launch videos a lot of recent play where Gates and Microsoft basically played an eerily similar role to Google with the iPhone launch. Of course MS, like Google did want to do everything.
It's clear as day why Steve felt betrayed by Google. As he said in the internal town hall:
We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake teams at Google want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. "Don't be evil is a load of crap"
{I've edited in the two updates/corrections from the bottom}