No, it did not work "seamlessly" with the OS. It was merely a storage media, not a usable RAM for the operating system which the iPhone had as well as storage existing on the system bus. There is a difference. The iPhone had at introduction either 4GB or 8GB of bus of fast FLASH memory. . . addressable by the processor which could be used either as storage or application space. The external Card Space you are talking about over and above the 128MB of internal RAM in the PPC-6700 was only storage for documents, pictures, etc. . . which is the case in the Androids that came later as well.
High-speed Internet. When the iPhone originally came out, 3G existed in only a few major cities, and then only spottily. I know, I was there. 2G was the standard on all systems and they were just starting to roll out the 3G networks. There was no real availability of 3G except in some very limited areas. By the time the networks had made them available, Apple had the iPhone 3G available. . . and people upgraded. So much for that argument.
AT&T's contract with Apple would not allow the iPhone to tether to a laptop. It was not that the iPhone could not. I was doing it by a work-around using the USB cable. I figured what the carrier didn't know, wasn't going to hurt them. I was paying for the bandwidth. So much for that argument.
I applaud Apple for stealing so many good ideas from companies such as HTC, Samsung, and IBM and incorporating them into the first I-phone. But face it even phones with touch screens came out several years before the first I-phone. Nearly all technological devices become more capable and smaller or thinner as time goes by.
Resistance touch screens are a completely different technology than CAPACITANCE multi-touch screens, fireman15, and Apple still holds the patent on low-voltage capacitance multi-touch screens for handheld devices. They invented them, not any of the previous makers and that was the breakthrough that enabled the functions of the iPhone. You can sing and dance all you want about the touch screen being around on phones. . . but you will find Apple at the beginning of those as well, with patents there as well. Apple even coined the name Personal Digital Assistant with the invention of the Newton PDA back in the late 1980s which was finally introduced in the early 1990s. . . and had a touch screen with a stylus. It lead the way to the PDA boom of the 1990s which preceded the touch screen phones.
Once again Swordmaker, you are making it up as you go along. 3G was available in every major market long before the first I-phone was released. 3G was available in 2006 in the Tacoma-Seattle and Portland areas and down the I-5 corridor between them. I know because that is where I used it. I also was able to use 3G on a trip to Florida and the Midwest during that time period. My brother is an airline pilot; he used his Verizon 3G laptop dongle all over the country long before the first I-phone was released. Maybe you could explain to him how we wasn't actually able to use the service he subscribed to. You are just making stuff up while trying to sound authoritative and it is all BS.
As far as your other comments about the PPC-6700s limitations... you are an ignorant fool who never actually used one. The HTC-6700 had a following after it came out and it was very easy to customize. You didn't have to "root" or "jailbreak" or anything else. Users had access to every folder on the device and could easily customize the ROM to improve their performance. I have a good friend who has always loved everything Apple. He bought the first I-phone. It was a laugh when we got together so he could show it off. It simply did not have the features that I relied upon at that time. Most notable was the lack of high speed Internet access and the ability to tether to a laptop; it also wouldn't work with my Bluetooth GPS sender. It was not useful for sending and receiving emails let alone composing them; it wasn't useful for browsing the Internet. You couldn't look over a word document. At this point I can't remember why he thought it was worth buying in the first place. Maybe you can explain to us all... all the great stuff a first generation I-phone was capable of. As far as I was concerned at the time it was a pretty good looking "feature phone" that was missing nearly everything that I used a "smart phone for.
But we have been through all of this before, haven't we. You are simply pretending to be ignorant to make your arguments in front of others who really do not know and will never bother to try and verify. Your rewriting of history on behalf of Apple is still annoying to me when you go completely off the reservation. Stick to what you know... and don't try to tell those of us who have a lot of experience with other devices what they were capable of.
If anyone cares to verify Swordmaker’s claim that Apple invented multi-touch and “gestures”... I ask that you look over the following info and links:
“1982 – First Multi-Touch System – Nimish Mehta , University of Toronto
The very first multi-touch system designed for computer input was a frosted glass panel with a camera that detected finger motion. This simple interface, which depended on a camera, allowed for multi-touch picture drawing.
1983 – Pioneer of Rich Gestures – Myron Krueger
Myron Krueger created a vision-based multi-touch system which enabled a rich set of gestures, including ones that were similar to today’s pinch-to-zoom gesture. You can view his hand gestures in this 1988 video. Although his system was vision based, the gestural interaction you see on your mobile phone got its first start on Myron’s system.
1984 – First Multi-Touch Screen – Bob Boie, Bell Labs, Murray Hill NJ
The invention of the first multi-touch screen used a transparent capacitive array of touch sensors overlaid on a CRT. Unlike multi-touch tablets, in which the touch input and visual output are separate from one another, the visual outputs of multi-touch screens are directly beneath the touch sensors.
1992 – Flip Keyboard – Bill Buxton
The multi-touch pad you see on today’s Macbooks had its origins in a multi-touch pad integrated into the bottom of a keyboard.
2001 – Diamond Touch – Mitsubishi Research Lab
Diamond Touch, created by Mitsubishi Research Labs, is a multi-touch system that projects an image onto a table, resembling the multi-touch technology in the iPhone. In fact, its technology is so close to the iPhone’s that Samsung’s legal team brought in a Diamond Touch table to try to prove that Apple’s pinch-to-zoom patent was not valid. Take a look at this video and see for yourself.
The full history of multi-touch systems is published in a white paper by Bill Buxton, a pioneer in multi-touch interfaces.”
Putting a capacitive touch screen as opposed to a resistive touch screen on a device with a phone included is not a revolutionary idea. It was simply evolution that someone or a corporation were working to get this combination to market. Claiming that this was some sort of stroke of genius is laughable.
https://inventhelp.com/archives/11-12/inventhelp-newsletter-november-2012/who-invented-multitouch
http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t35HXAjNW6s