[fireman15]

it had only 128 MB internal storage. . . it was not a smartphone.

Swordmaker shame on you. As usual you exaggerate and mislead to make your point. The PPC-6700 was far more capable than the first I-phone by nearly every measure. They chose a slide-out keyboard rather than a touch screen which gave it a tactile feel and kept the display clear which made it far quicker to type on.

As far as and memory and storage goes... it had 128 MB (Flash memory), 64 MB Ram, and a slot for a memory card which worked seamlessly with the operating system. Most people I knew filled the slot with as big a card as they could afford. One should remember that it came out 2 years ahead of the I-phone and memory at that time was rapidly becoming more and more affordable. The first memory card that I bought had 1GB, the second had 2GBs.

When the first I-phone came out... it lacked the most important feature of the PPC-6700... high speed internet access and the ability to tether to a laptop. When the first I-phone came out I am not aware of even one useful function that it could perform that we PPC-6700 users were not already doing.

And that is the comedy of all of your arguments here. You always focus on pictures and not function. What you are referring to as far as technology are not revolutionary ideas... they are evolutionary developments. 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.

So of course two years after the HTC-6700 came out when the first I-phone was released there had been some advances in electronic components... But released the same time as the I-phone was the HTC-Titan, which did away with the external antenna stub, was thinner, came with more memory, and higher capacity memory cards. And even the PPC-6700 had cute little icons that you could use to represent apps. So your points on appearance are completely moot.

[Swordmaker]

As far as and memory and storage goes... it had 128 MB (Flash memory), 64 MB Ram, and a slot for a memory card which worked seamlessly with the operating system. Most people I knew filled the slot with as big a card as they could afford. One should remember that it came out 2 years ahead of the I-phone and memory at that time was rapidly becoming more and more affordable. The first memory card that I bought had 1GB, the second had 2GBs.

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.