10 Years Ago: iPhone Intro

Ten years ago Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world and changed what the term “smart phone” meant. It was probably his greatest demo. If you have a an hour and a half watch it here. Warning, once I started I couldn’t stop.

I had forgotten some of the innovations:

• Visual Voicemail
• Separate ongoing sms conversations
• a widescreen touch based iPod with coverflow
• the accelerometer that could switch between portrait and landscape
• multitouch - listen to the cheers at scrolling and pinch-to-zoom
• I forgot about WAP, good riddance
• I have no memory of Apple making an old-style one ear bluetooth headset
• It was at this event that they changed their name from Apple Computer to Apple

Some things are now quaint:

• The “giant” 3.5" 160ppi screen
• Sync’ing everything with iTunes was a feature
• How slowly web pages loaded, but how fast it seemed
• Yahoo Mail was the biggest mail provider and it was a big deal that push iMAP was free
• 4GB and 8GB models

Here’s my post about the keynote and shortly thereafter on some notable limitations.