The smartphone from the company was submitted in January 2007 and put on sale half a year later; it had a 3.5-inch screen, and would not admit applications
The January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in San Francisco during the MacWorld conference (the company put it on sale almost half a year later, on the 29th of June). It was not the first cell of the company: was the ROKR, an iPod with a phone that was made in partnership with Motorola (by then, one of the global giants of the mobile telephony thanks to the success of the slim RAZR, 2004). It was not, either, the first smartphone (a segment that had been born ten years earlier, with the Nokia Communicator), nor the first with a touch screen (the Palm Treo, to name just a brand, it just took the better part of decade on the market, the same as BlackBerry), or the first to have a full browser based on Webkit that allowed him to view a regular Website, and not your WAP version (there was the Nokia N95, presented in September 2006 and put up for sale in march 2007). Yes was the first to implement multi-touch on a phone (something that to us today is obvious; the gesture of the pincitas to zoom) and use screens capacitive (the current of glass, faster than the ones used until then, made of plastic) to improve the interaction with the computer.
And above all it was the first smartphone as we think of it today; as well as a computer that you are using with command line (typing instructions), and another with a graphical interface of windows and mice are, in both cases, personal computers, but you are not the same thing. Don’t do the same, the philosophy behind it is not the same, the ease of interaction is different.
The key is in the front of the iPhone: the phone function is absent, it is just a plus icon in the grid of options. Because the virtue of Apple was to think the device is the reverse of what you have been doing. Nokia talking by then that you had to stop to say that there were phones and think computers multimedia, but the front of interaction the team had a good part dedicated to the buttons to start and end a call. This was a company that made phones -the world’s largest, by far – and saw the world from the lens of a cellular phone to which we added functions. All of your competitors, even the most advanced then (BlackBerry, Samsung, Palm) had the same vision.
Apple made computers, and saw the world from that perspective: that of the malleability absolute. That’s why -and beyond aesthetic issues – there was a single front button: because the key was in the operating system, and to offer a pocket pc with connection to the Internet. Talking on the phone was one more option. That’s why he grabbed so setback to its competitors: though the idea of pocket computer was in the air, all still making phones first, and you added things later. Apple thought the other way around. And he had, moreover, the advantage of not having to comply with a previous history or anterior esthetics, as did its competitors, who are not encouraged to turn over a new leaf. Apple started with a clean sheet.
by the way: back then the iPhone was very limited; and with him, Apple was raising a discussion that would continue until our days. The first iPhone did not have the possibility of adding applications, because the concept was that everything would be done with the browser. At one point, it was the same concept that then Google applied for Chrome OS in 2009: stop all interaction with the outside world is done with the browser -the most advanced time – opens up an infinite world of possibilities, reduces the impact on the device, simplifies its development, and so on. By then the warehouse software was Java for the common cellular, or Symbian, or applications for Palm OS and Windows Mobile operating systems that were a decade older without modernization. The Apple store for the iPhone would come only in 2008. Today has 2.2 million applications, and the operating system of the iPhone -such as that of a conventional computer – updated on a regular basis, something unheard of for the cell of the time (and for some modern, unfortunately).
True to its style, the company took some ideas that already existed, the converted for their own use, gave them back and applied them in a way different from the rest. Some years ago that there are teams just as good -or better-in some aspects-; years ago, and that Android (which arrived in November 2007; part of its development was contemporary to that of the iPhone, although oriented screens with a keyboard) won the fight of the large-scale, leaving on the way to Windows Phone, BlackBerry and Symbian; it is difficult to find today a substantial difference between the best of Android and the latest iPhone, although it maintains its status as aspirational and their legion of followers (but not the rate of sales, which slowed in the past few quarters; still remains as the second largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world).
it Is predictable: the evolution of the technology flattens the differences. Happened 10 years ago when, beyond design, all the phones were more or less the same thing, and some were looking for, in the “smart” functions, a way to differentiate yourself. When it arrived, the iPhone was not the first smartphone. It does not matter: since 2007, all seem to him.
No comments:
Post a Comment