The phone that changed it all
The 10th birthday of the iphone reminds us that mobile Internet was made possible by this pioneering device
Ten years ago last Thursday Apple co-founder Steve Jobs stood on a San Francisco stage and shared with his thrilled audience the most famous of his “one more thing” lines. It was the introduction of the iphone. And it changed everything. The world was never the same again. The Internet moved from our desktops to our pockets. It took on a centrality in our lives we could never have imagined.
In 2007 the average cellphone was distinguished by how small it was. Nokia was king of the voice-calling 2G era, selling two out of three phones. Its 2 inch-screen phones were the epitome of cool, and the handset of choice for Neo (Keanu Reeves) to escape from The Matrix, in the groundbreaking film about the possibilities of virtual reality.
Back then the only reliable and convenient way to get your e-mail on your cellphone was on a Blackberry. The rudimentary wireless broadband was expensive and slow. Getting the Internet on these tiny screens was cumbersome and infuriating.
But the iphone ditched the keypad as the interface. It was the innovation of having just one button that was arguably the most striking break with tradition. That and the “huge”
3.5 inch/8.8 cm screen, which now seems comically small compared with today’s 5-6 inch screens.
Because we used our fingers on it, the iphone was something brand new. It revolutionised the mobile Internet because it eschewed the previous touchscreen interface, which was that impossible-to-use stylus. Jobs pioneered not only using our fingers, but using more than one. This is the often overlooked reason the iphone’s interface was so extraordinary. Because it could handle multitouch it was possible to pinch to zoom: it was one of the iphone’s great breakthroughs, as it reduced websites designed for larger desktop screens to manageable, readable chunks.
The first iphone was more orientated towards e-mail than SMS, given the then market bias of the US, and you couldn’t forward an SMS in the first iteration.
Though larger screens and other innovations would start to emerge from the Android camp, Apple would still break ground with the app store (with the iphone 3GS in 2008, which now accounts for a significant revenue share), voice assistant Siri (iphone 4, 2011), the slim, reversible Lightning connector (iphone 5, 2012), and fingerprint readers (iphone 5, 2013).
As Facebook reached 2bn users last week, it’s worth recognising it could not have done so without the smartphone revolution the iphone has led. Mobile has become the default device of our data-intensive era, propelling other services, such as
Youtube (which counts its 1.5bn monthly users as those logged into the service), Instagram (700m) and Twitter (328m). Chinese messaging giant Wechat has 938m monthly active users and new kid Snapchat has 166m daily users. None of this would have been possible before the iphone.
It was the innovation of having just one button that was arguably the most striking break with tradition