What were those "completely unique capabilities" at launch? There was no App Store. It didn't record video. It didn't have 3G. It was actually a fairly ho-hum phone.
The real web available in your pocket. If you weren’t using the mobile web before then, it was a decidedly second-class experience until mobile Safari launched. It took Google 2-3 years after the iPhone to get Android to be comparable and by then the App Store was booming, which basically doomed all of the old phones. Previously selling apps required paying off each carrier and giving huge percentages of the sales, so there were almost no apps of decent quality available. At WWDC 2008, there was spontaneous applause when it launched with much better terms, hard as that may be to believe now.
It was a ho-hum phone by the existing standard of mobile phones. But it offered a full-size capacitive touchscreen and a desktop-level operating system. These were both unique in the market, and importantly they were designed together for a cohesive experience that nobody else could match. The iPhone introduced UI affordances like inertial touch scrolling which we take for granted today, and that UI enabled things like mobile web browsing that didn’t suck.
The iPod touch was an important pillar of this new platform’s introduction. It’s often forgotten today, but a lot of people around the world got introduced to iOS on the iPod rather than the iPhone.
Can you elaborate further on what you mean by a "desktop-level operating system"? By what metric(s)/feature-set? Because Windows Mobile out-did it every way in terms of multitasking, file system et al. You couldn't even multitask on an iPhone until iOS 4 in 2010.
The capacitive touchscreen wasn't unique, the LG Prada was announced prior to the original iPhone, and launched before the original iPhone too. Perhaps "unusual" would be a better term.
I had an iPhone at launch, and perhaps it's down to what websites you used (I'm a Brit), but the browsing experience was pretty terrible until people started developing responsive websites, and it really wasn't until ~2009-2010 that this took off in any appreciable or meaningful capacity in the UK, and even then, it was still common to have a separate mobile version of a website up until 2013. Prior to that, an app for larger websites became much more common, and offered a much better experience than the mobile website or responsive website ever did. Browsing the web over 2G sucked. Websites having buttons too small to press with your fingers also sucked.
Websites that were 100% Flash were super common, as were Flash elements. Even the PlayStation Portable could display Flash in the browser by 2005 after an official firmware update from Sony.
I also had Windows Mobile, BlackBerry et al in the years prior to that.
Sure, pinch-to-zoom, that was serviceable in lieu of a responsive website or mobile site, but it still sucked versus just using the app for the site when the App Store eventually launched. Furthermore, most of the software innovation was happening in Cydia via jailbreaks prior to the App Store launch. Even then, for a considerable number of years following it. Apple would frequently incorporate whatever was hot on Cydia as a concept on the next major version of iOS.
You didn't seem to like your original iPhone. That's ok. I, for one, loved my iPod Touch. It had a full-fledged iPod music app that really worked flawlessly with podcasts and my large music library. I even paid for the update that gave me calendar, mail, and contacts because I wanted to read my emails on the go. Maps was wonderful, there was great YouTube app to watch videos in bed, and Safari worked ok while we were all waiting for responsive websites.
Of course the App Store was an explosion of functionality, but there was a lot to love about iOS before third-party apps appeared.
I liked my original iPhone prior to the launch of the App Store—but it was only jailbreaking and adding a lot of features via Cydia that made it a keeper, even after the launch of the App Store.
iOS was largely lacking for many years. No copy-paste until 2009, no multi-tasking until 2010. It was rough, even as a diehard Apple fan at the time.
There were countless times that I had phone envy—paying more to get considerably less functionality didn't sit well with me at the time. It definitely felt like a toy at times. Everybody wanted to play with the gimmicks like drinking a virtual beer or swooshing a lightsabre, or playing Tap Tap Revenge or Angry Birds, but as a daily-driver phone for productivity and not screwing around, it was pretty lacking.
This was the era when you bought a "smartphone" to do productive things, not screw around. I also liked my PSP, but it wasn't a productivity device, despite having a pretty kick-ass web browser with Flash support and a decent-sized screen.
Windows Mobile in 2007 was based on Windows CE, a completely different and much more limited kernel compared to desktop Windows. Symbian and BlackBerry had the same limitations: these were operating systems designed for embedded devices, not desktop-level computing. They were memory efficient but their growth path was nonexistent.
The original iPhone OS used the underpinnings of Mac OS X: the Mach kernel, CoreGraphics, the Cocoa Foundation APIs… At the iPhone launch, Apple even called the phone operating system “OS X” to highlight that it’s the same.
The combination of screen size, resolution, and non-broken browser to render non-mobile-specific websites tolerably.
That's how it broke the “smartphones are niche because the mobile web sucks, and the mobile web sucks because there are so few users that its not worth improving” barrier.
Don’t forget Apply also got the soft keyboard right which was no small feat. People were dead set against it but here we are no physical keyboards anywhere on smartphones.
Sure. Not sure that was indepedently important (for adoption, it clearly had a big impact on the course of mobile interaction) but even if it wasn’t it was essential to the web thing, because otherwise you couldn’t have a usable keyboard and a sufficiently large screen.
It had the first phone web browser, and indeed the first web browser on any device smaller than a laptop, which didn't make you want to immediately throw it out the window. That was a big deal.
The blackberry message thread context was terrible, iPhone was better - come on, don't lie. The idea you could get full screen visual context was the kicker - blackberry screens were 'decent' but when it was a ~2.5 inch height, compared to the iPhone - it was unreadable.
