They were the first device with a big display and a first-class web browser. That created the smartphone market you now take for granted but was completely revolutionary at the time when most devices had tiny screens and half their physical size was a keyboard.

The other big thing is more subtle: the iPhone was the first major break in the carriers’ value-extraction model. It was common that you’d get phones with half the storage used by promo apps the carrier wouldn’t let you uninstall, and the carrier app stores were both limited and unbelievably expensive. We had multiple clients who were interested in mobile apps but the cost of being in the stores was like $50k per carrier plus half of the proceeds, and that was an improvement over the time Qualcomm demanded to see the balance sheet so they could decide what percentage of their TOTAL revenue was fair – we asked and they confirmed that they expected a cut of every sale, even ones which never involved the mobile app. The energy at WWDC08 was incredible because the app stores were both terms were so much better than anyone had gotten before, and you only had to do it once. I still think it should be better now but it used to be so much worse.

There were high-end WinCE and Symbian devices with large displays and no physical keyboards (or sliders where keyboard doesn't encroach on screen size). To remind, first-gen iPhone was 3.5" @ 320x480 in 2007; for comparison, Dell Axim was 3.7" @ 480x640 in 2005, and by 2007 there were some WinMo handhelds with 480x800.

The thing that really made iPhone different was capacitive touchscreen, and the OS designed around that. WinMo pretty much required the stylus for many things.

Also note “and a first-class web browser” in my compound statement. If you used devices of that era, the browsers sucked at handling most of the web. I knew people who had the previous generation devices (I’m excluding the PalmOS ones I owned since they required a stylus) but nobody used the mobile browser much because it was so unrewarding, and everyone I know replaced them with iPhones due to the web experience.

In 2007, the lack of Flash support alone would disqualify it from being "first class" IMO.

Opinions varied widely on that - the Flash experience on mobile was horrible enough that it works equally well as an argument that “the web” and Flash were substantially not the same.

It was definitely horrible, but given how pervasive Flash was on the web then, I think a more reasonable takeaway is to say that no mobile device had first-class browser support until HTML5 <video> became prevalent. To me, "first class" implies "I can visit any popular website and expect it to work", which was decidedly not the case for iPhone at introduction.

Yes, the iPhone was nicer to use than what was available in the market the day before it launched.

But the iPhone did _not_ have any first mover advantage. If anything, Apple was late to the party.

Everything you say might be true, but I wouldn't necessarily call that first mover advantage.

> [...] when most devices had tiny screens and half their physical size was a keyboard.

Ie Apple introduced a new, arguably better, entrant into an existing market, and managed to grow that market.

But I can see your argument that you can re-interpret being that first to really commit to a big touch-screen only and (almost) no buttons to be a 'first move'. (Though a different comment mentioned that Apple wasn't the first here either?)

The iPhone was definitely a successful device!

Also note the part after “and” - I wrote that as a compound sentence because I saw more people than I expected go from both earlier smartphones or PDAs because the iPhone gave them the web in a way that earlier devices just didn’t. None of my clients had seen much in the way of public mobile web (or WAP) adoption prior to that, but that changed surprisingly quickly when the iPhone launched.

Yes. Out of curiosity, what do you mean by your clients?

I worked with a number of organizations which built public web apps. Nobody really asked about support for mobile browsers before the iPhone - some people checked that, say, an order form was technically functional but the assumption was that if it was slow or hard to read that was more to be expected than something they were going to pay to improve.

+ being early on capacitive touchscreens and multi-touch

Yes, though touchscreens weren't exactly an Apple invention either.

I seem to dimly remember that they had some early lead on multitouch. But that one specific nifty technology is a far cry from a general 'first mover advantage' in phones with apps.

Apps weren't what drove people to the original iPhone (the original iPhone didn't have an app store). Apple was essentially the first mainstream company to commit fully to the current smartphone design — a flat, rectangular, portrait aspect ratio brick, with a single slab of capacitive multi-touch glass. There were many other competing form factors at the time. Apple correctly deduced that touching your screen is the most intuitive way to interact with smaller devices, and they had a huge first mover advantage by committing to that paradigm early.

They also included WiFi in every model and iOS had transparent prioritization of WiFi over cellular. Apple's deal with Cingular (AT&T) also gave the iPhone plan unlimited data.

That meant the iPhone had a full fledged browser that you could actually use. The browsers on PalmOS and Windows Mobile were jokes compared to Safari and most devices didn't have WiFi so we're always stuck on relatively slow cellular. A lot of smartphone plans also didn't include unlimited data. The BlackBerry plans were equally terrible, tied to BBM accounts, and the browsers were even worse.

The iPhone also had a real e-Mail client that could connect directly to a POP/IMAP server. A lot of competing smartphones only supported e-Mail through gateways run by the carriers or an enterprise connection. Even lacking features early on like BCC early iOS Mail was a lot better than the competition for normal users.

I think these all come down to Apple approaching the iPhone from asking what normal people might want to do with their phones instead of what "corporate" wanted people to do with their smartphones. This was 180° from the design approach of RIM, Microsoft, Palm, and even Nokia.

Nokia did pioneer using the smartphone as a decent digital camera (among other things).

For instance decent enough to take a picture of an A4 page and be able to read it afterwards.

And IMAP support.

And Opera mini was a good enough browser, though mostly for text, as indeed 3G cellular (which the first iPhone didn't have) then cost 1000€/Go (funnily enough, that felt cheap and fast at the time, because it indeed was compared to what came before).

(Also video calls, though those are still niche for phones.)

And I hear Nokias were themselves quite primitive compared to what Japan had ?

> The browsers on PalmOS and Windows Mobile were jokes compared to Safari and most devices didn't have WiFi so we're always stuck on relatively slow cellular.

Again, everything in your comment this seems like Apple made an arguably better offering in an existing market. That's not a first mover advantage.

If anything you can say, Apple was late to the party and learned from the mistakes of others?

> Again, everything in your comment this seems like Apple made an arguably better offering in an existing market. That's not a first mover advantage.

I never claimed Apple had a first mover advantage. They made a smartphone much more aligned to consumer desires than any of the competition. Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia all approached smartphones from the angle of business/enterprise users.

You can call Apple's approach being late to the party but that presumes that them entering some market is a forgone conclusion. Apple has rarely if ever been truly first to market with a product.

Apps weren't the iPhone's first mover advantage. It was a quality data plan, browser, and hardware to support them.

Apple doesn't even have any data plans, do they? I mean Google sometimes plays at being an ISP with projects like Loon or Google Fibre, but Apple has never done that?

The original iPhone was sold exclusively with an AT&T bundled plan in the US

OK. Was the data plan exclusive to the iPhone? (Or was it just the iPhone being exclusive to the data plan.)

It was exclusive to the iPhone, in that the iPhone + ATT plan was the only unlimited data plan you could get at release on a non-carrier controlled general purpose smartphone.

Which is to say, not one that locked away features and functionality (ringtones! games!) to create additional revenue channels for carriers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but per memory Jobs used iPhone exclusivity to crack carrier "Our pipes" models open.

> in that the iPhone + ATT plan was the only unlimited data plan you could get at release on a non-carrier controlled general purpose smartphone.

I had unlimited data on non-carrier controlled phones pre-iPhone on AT&T, and it was far cheaper than the iPhone data plan. Dumbphone plans had cheap data add-ons in comparison, just take the SIM from the ultra-cheap phone they included in the plan and drop it in whatever unlocked GSM phone you wanted. It supported 3G before the iPhone even launched. You just had to get a 3G-enabled cheap dumbphone with your plan to ensure you got a 3G-activated SIM.

Obviously, they didn't market this so most consumers didn't know this was an option.