Comments on: Photo of phones before and after the iPhone

By: Gary Flores

Gary Flores — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:45:00 +0000

Don’t be silly, try to fit a 4.5 in screen in any of the old phone shapes?
This is the phone after the introduction of touch screens, not iphones.

By: Jason Carlin

Jason Carlin — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:28:00 +0000

Actually, you would most likely see an array of software UIs that mimic Apple even more closely than the hardware.

By: Terry Power

Terry Power — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:44:00 +0000

I see the phone in the top center of the left looks just like those newer phones. So did my Samsung 700i that was a Windows phone back in 2007 (even had an app that allowed me to turn on my TV and change channels)

By: alphaxion

alphaxion — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:25:00 +0000

I’ve been using smartphones since 2002, when the XDA turned up from O2 – back before HTC decided to use their own name as a brand instead of producing for others to rebrand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_Xda
http://www.mobile88.com/cellphone/O2/O2-XDA/photos.asp

That form facter was certainly on it’s way years before the iphone turned up.

By: ignacio alcocer

ignacio alcocer — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:01:00 +0000

bullshit, they are comparing the 2007 iPhone with previous to 2000 cellphone models…

By: Paolo Zago

Paolo Zago — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:57:00 +0000

Saying that the iPaq is “like the iphone” is quite a stretch, at least as far as aesthetic is concerned, something that seems not to be so clear to the average geek…
But the point is not who invented the look or who did full touchscreen – no stilus phones first (I claim to have thought of it almost two years before the iphone but ditched it as “no one will want this without keys” :D ), the point is that pre-iphone this “styling” was absolutely rare in phone design, and now every phone basically looks the same. This is probably a natural evolution, but I think it’s fair to say that the iphone was a great contributor to the incredible “speed” of this evolution.

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:25:00 +0000

Where we see design, you see functionality

Old palms don’t look like iPhones, ergo moot point.

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:20:00 +0000

People that say that are wrong though; and that isn’t the observation here.

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:16:00 +0000

Not really, the success of the iPhone changed the landscape in terms of phone design, if anything it’s an obvious observation – but yes the image is an exaggeration.

Nokia led the way in candy bar design back in the day too – or is that me being a Nokia fanboy?

By: Joe Youngblood

Joe Youngblood — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:13:00 +0000

You can’t really say that the iPhone made this change, that would down play all of the market innovation that was occurring well before Apple introduced the device to hipsters around the world. There was a lot of talk about phone going complete touch screen building on the success of the stylus based phones. There was numerous amounts of surveys and market testing going on as well.

Palm, Blackberry and Microsoft were kind of leaders in that arena, until Apple dropped the iphone after a masterful marketing program that drove up buzz about the device which was effectively just an ipod that made phone calls.

With or Without the iPhone we would have had full size “candybar” touch screen phones, it was the next logical step as the technology moved forward at a blistering pace.

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:11:00 +0000

And of course the fact that they didn’t resemble iPhones.

Some people seem to really struggle with aesthetics and only see features and functionality.

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:10:00 +0000

Not quite the same though is it?

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:07:00 +0000

I had an O2 smartphone, and an HP palm pilot type thing.

They had touchscreens, sure; but they didn’t look anything like the one on the right.

The prevalence of phones that look like the iPhone are due to the success of the iPhone; it’s a simple argument that is unrelated to fanboys.

By: LAPete

LAPete — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:43:00 +0000

Count over 6 from the left, top row. Turn this one OFF and it looks just like all of the phones on the left.

By: TheKaz1969

TheKaz1969 — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:40:00 +0000

WTF?!? Sony just announced some phones with friggin’ COLOR on the case. don’t they know they are supposed to copy the iPhone?!?

By: Hel M.

Hel M. — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 21:47:00 +0000

I really miss phones that had faceplates that could be changed. I had like a dozen faceplates for any phone I had. Zagg makes colored invisible shields, but it’s not the same.

By: TheMarchingMorons

TheMarchingMorons — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 20:39:00 +0000

What about HTC XDA (2002) or IBM Simon (1992)? Then again, talking about such ideas are so ‘uncool’, let’s keep talking about Apple!

By: Anil

Anil — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 18:20:00 +0000

You can update the photos - http://widefide.com/mobile/mobile-phone-industry-before-and-after-iphone-widefide

By: Zachary Cutlip

Zachary Cutlip — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:43:00 +0000

I disagree. It isn’t that phones have become boring. Instead, it’s that what is now interesting is what phones can DO for us, rather than how they are shaped. Before, when the most exciting thing a cell phone could do beyond texting and calling was take shitty pictures, the only thing to differentiate them was to make them look exciting. Now, the most exciting things about phones are no longer skin-deep.

By: oasisob1

oasisob1 — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:19:00 +0000

I just signed up for unlimited cognitive budget. Problem solved.

By: Daen de Leon

Daen de Leon — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 06:37:00 +0000

And even after the Newton, it was obvious which way mobile computing device form factors were headed anyway (even if the Nino wasn’t a phone).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_Nino

By: benher

benher — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 05:04:00 +0000

Well, I miss bakelite rotary phones too – but I’ll take my iCloud and GPS thank you.

By: willyboy

willyboy — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 03:24:00 +0000

I think it is ‘nitpick’, not ‘nit pick’

By: willyboy

willyboy — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 03:23:00 +0000

and I want my TV framed in red.

By: Roger Strong

Roger Strong — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:11:00 +0000

When Apple fanboys think Apple was first, they photoshop some images and post them to BoingBoing and elsewhere. When someone shows otherwise, that someone is repetitive and dull. Right. Gotcha. WhatEVer.

By: DewiMorgan

DewiMorgan — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 19:08:00 +0000

So I just Googled “wiki pda”… then when I saw that Google tab later, I got all confused.

By: DewiMorgan

DewiMorgan — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 18:32:00 +0000

I really like that form factor. Like most concepts, it presumes a little on our current ability to miniaturise, uses useless solar panels for coolness, and has moving parts that are guaranteed to break and/or to cause the corner of the keyboard to be driven into the screen.

But even a little thicker, and without the rotating hinges and solar panels, the design answers every single grumble I have about the current “utterly useless as an actual phone” chocolatebar form factor, while at the same time protecting the screen and so on.

I do hope someone picks up on it.

By: umbrarchist

umbrarchist — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:13:00 +0000

Maybe we need to distinguish between innovation and stupid and useless if cute variations. And then our economists ignore DEMAND SIDE DEPRECIATION.

We manufacture unrepairable junk and it never gets subtracted to compute NDP.
DUH, what’s NDP? Net Domestic Product. Oh yeah, according to economists only Capital Goods depreciate. 200,000,000 cars in the US in 1995 but they did not depreciate. Yeah Right!

http://www.toxicdrums.com/economic-wargames-by-dal-timgar.html

By: NatWu

NatWu — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:10:00 +0000

So how long has this picture been floating around on the interwebs now? And been thoroughly criticized for being misleading or just plain wrong? This is just too old.

By: jakers_ugly_brother

jakers_ugly_brother — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 14:31:00 +0000

It’s not that you’re right, wrong, or hopelessly myopic, it’s that you’re repetitive and dull.