Somehow you keep forgetting to mention the processor in the PPC-6700 that despite being two years earlier ran actually a little faster than the original (excuse me) iPhone. You also conveniently forget to mention that the 128MBs of onboard storage on the PPC-6700 was expandable via a mini-SD card slot. You forget to mention that there was an additional 64MBs of SDRAM and 128MBs of user accessible and easily modifiable ROM. The screen was approximately 1/2 inch smaller than the massive 3.5” screen on the iPhone. But you seem to forget that a large portion of the iPhone’s screen was used by the onscreen keypad when actually using it to input data.
The biggest thing that you forget to mention is that Windows phones were able to run a massive selection of Programs of all varieties when the iPhone first was introduced. What you could do with the first iPhone was extremely limited by comparison. This is especially true when comparing 3G connectivity which the iPhone did not even have. All of this was intentional by Apple because they correctly predicted that they could sell an expensive toy with a slick ad campaign.
I can vividly remember comparing what I was using with a first generation iPhone. If it had been a very capable device I would have bought one. I have purchased a lot of devices over the years... even a few from Apple. As I said previously however it was not capable of doing what I used my phone for despite having a slightly bigger screen and a gimmicky new touch input that was slightly better for showing off pictures taken with its mediocre camera. But it was no revolutionary development. You are the one with the flawed memory, but you do have a very good imagination when it comes up to making up condescending remarks about devices you never used and know absolutely nothing about.
Sorry, I'm forgetting nothing. You just don't know what you're talking about. Comparing processors based on clock speed gets you nothing worthwhile or dispositive. It's meaningless unless you are comparing Apples to Apples, i.e. running the same processor and OS.
However, you are technically wrong. The PPC-6700 Apache was equipped with an Intel 416Mhz processor. The original iPhone came with an ARM processor from Samsung which clocked to 640MHz, but Apple under clocked it to 412MHz for power and video reproduction reasons. The difference is less than 1% but you have to realize the architecture differences to understand the memory access on the iPhone was far faster so apps ran much faster, especially anything that required data retrieval. . . or moving pixels around a screen. . . which the iPhone excelled at because it came not only with a data processor, it also came with a PowerVR MBX Lite 3D GPU to handle those graphics, something your PPC-6700 did not bother to worry about, handling the graphics with the Intel data processor!
You forget to mention that there was an additional 64MBs of SDRAM and 128MBs of user accessible and easily modifiable ROM. The screen was approximately 1/2 inch smaller than the massive 3.5” screen on the iPhone. But you seem to forget that a large portion of the iPhone’s screen was used by the onscreen keypad when actually using it to input data.
So what if there was a measly additional SLOW storage RAM? It wasn't usable for applications except for storage. . . because it was SLOW and had to be paged in and out. It was treated as a drive. So WHAT if the user had to play around with ROMs. Users, for the most part, really don't want to fiddle around with their phones, they want to USE them.
But you seem to forget that a large portion of the iPhone’s screen was used by the onscreen keypad when actually using it to input data.
Your PPC-6700 had an off-the-shelf 3" screen with resolution of 240 X 320 pathetic for displaying photos or videos. . . and very few colors. The iPhone had 320 X 480, twice the resolution and 262 thousand colors.
The iPhone's keyboard only took up half the screen and was quite usable, and it did not REQUIRE the use of a losable stylus as the PPC-6700 did, without which the screen would be useless, which could only input ONE character sequentially. . . and then require the stylus to navigate to the next key before the next character could be slowly input if the on-screen keyboard was invoked. . . and reviews of the PPC-6700 complain that it frequently popped up unwanted even when users were typing on the chiclet keyboard and then had to be dismissed before continuing their typing.
You call the camera in the iPhone "mediocre", but it had a far better camera with 2 megapixels and glass lenses than the plastic lensed 1 Megapixel camera in your vaunted PPC-6700, which lacked the memory to take very many photos at all.
You complain about the price of the iPhone, yet you ignore the fact that your 6700 with its limited features originally retailed for a whopping $629—$30 more than the original $599 the 8GB iPhone sold for and certainly more than the $499 the 4GB iPhone sold for. So much for your specious iPhone pricing arguments. Don't bother to bring them up again. (The PPC-6700 was later discounted to $399 as was the 8GB iPhone.)
But it was no revolutionary development.
If the iPhone was not revolutionary, fireman15, just WHERE are the phone makers that preceded it that are still on the market today? Where are the Nokia, Microsoft, RIM Blackberry, Motorola, Ericsson, and dozens of other competing phones? If they were so entrenched and so successful, where are they now? Why are the phones that are competitive to the iPhone now essentially copies of the iPhone design?
You can't answer any of those questions truthfully because you would have to admit your argument is lost.