You are the one who keeps making meaningless comparisons. I made a meaningful comparison many years ago when I compared the features of my two year old smart phone with a friend’s iPhone soon after it was released. It would not do what I needed a smart phone to do at that time. That is the only kind of comparison that truly matters... will the device do what you need it to do.
Most importantly I needed a phone that gave me a high speed internet connection to tether to my laptop to at a reasonable price when I was at work and away from home. Everything else was actually secondary to that need.
The phone that I had also had far more other functions and features than the original iPhone did. A couple of examples... it would play a wide variety of both video and music files and gave me many choices of available programs. It worked with my Bluetooth GPS and a variety of moving map software was available.
The first iPhone had very limited music and video options and would not work with any GPS devices that I am aware of. 3rd party software for the first iPhone was all but non-existent. There were many thousands of programs and applications available for windows smart phones by the time the iPhone was first released.
The device I owned had plenty of processing power, ram, rom and storage for everything that I used it for. I used to joke that it was more powerful than the IBM Pentium laptop that I had been using for several years when I got the phone. And the specs were actually better... but it was a laptop and the phone was a phone.
When I was in school pursuing an engineering degree I had a work study job working in the computer lab. I helped students mostly with programming, Word Perfect 5.1, Lotus 123 release 2 with its associated macro language, and some other productivity programs on PCs. These were truly revolutionary programs that gave PC users nearly the same capabilities that previously were available only to businesses with very expensive computer systems and personnel. I also maintained the computers and the menu system we had set up in DOS.
The computers had 360K 5 1/4” floppy disc drives and 10 MB hard drives with CGA monitors. They ran at 8 MHZ and had 640 KB of RAM. We were using MSDOS; Windows did not exist at that time. But of course users could still accomplish more productive work with them than with any tiny phone that came along 20 years later.
Software was far more efficient when the hardware was much more limited. Your condescending quoting of specs is almost completely meaningless. It just does not matter... it is what you can accomplish with a tool that matters. The first iPhone was never meant to be a serious productivity tool. It was very limited and users had very few options outside of the applications that Apple included with it.
The first iPhones allowed one to take mediocre digital pictures that the phones of that time period were capable of. It allowed one to listen to the music and video formats that Apple allowed. It of course worked as a phone and could send and receive textual messages and had very limited internet capabilities on the road because of its lack of high speed cellular data.
There was nothing revolutionary about the first iPhone other than Apple’s successful Ad campaign and the number of consumers who wanted a cool toy with very limited potential. How much foresight does it really take to specify a slightly larger screen with a resolution that was higher than phones that came out two years earlier? How much foresight does it take to specify that it be narrower by leaving off a slide out keyboard? How much foresight does it take to specify that it have slightly better specs than the phones that came before it? And this hyping up its use of an input device that others thought of and developed first? It was not revolutionary... it did not even do as much as many other devices that came before it.
Because of its success it did have an effect on cell phone designers from that time period. Just like a successful clothing designer affects women’s fashion. Just like a successful car design affects other car designers.
Apple insisting that everyone else is copying Apple is a game that they have played from the beginning. It is called “projection”... accusing others of doing what you are doing. Look at the Samsung Gear Watch for one of the more recent examples. The Samsung Gear II watch that I own does basically everything that an Apple watch does only it came out years before. Maybe Samsung should be suing Apple for stealing its ideas.
Apple has always been an aggressive and litigious marketing company, not a true technology leader. They have sued the true innovators repeatedly. Apple has an army of lawyers who are even better at rewriting history than you are. They stick to the three C’s... and I am not talking about Compliance, Communication and Compassion. I am talking about “If you can’t convince them, confuse them; If you can’t confuse them, corrupt them”.
Please point us to the MULTITOUCH capacitance screen phones that existed prior to the iPhone. Point to ANY touch screen phone that did not require a stylus for input. You can’t. They did not exist. Ergo, that statement is false.
Apple has always been an aggressive and litigious marketing company, not a true technology leader. They have sued the true innovators repeatedly.
Please cite the lawsuits Apple has instigated. I listed them for you. . . But you imply that Apple is always suing "the true innovators." Prove it. Cite the cases. Show us your proof. Did Microsoft create the Graphical User Interface? Was not Apple’s code found in Microsoft’s Windows Video Player? Did not Apple WIN the Samsung suit? Where are the suits against the "true innovators" you claim Apple is always bringing? You can’t cite them because they don’t exist.
Apple has a reputation of licensing the IP, or buying the companies who produce the IP, it uses, unlike Microsoft and Google whose business model, especially early on, was to steal IP and wait for small developers to sue themselves into bankruptcy, at which point Microsoft would buy them at fire sale prices, while Google just ignored such things as IP patents and copyrights. . . not even bothering to file off the serial numbers (comments in code) in what they appropriated.
I’m done with this since you toss off evidenceless one liners like that last claim. I’m not going to spend my time arguing with an idiot who has such a tenuous grasp of history to claim such twaddle, or to claim both sides of an argument that YOUR SUPER POWERFUL Windows phone with 128 MB and a 416 MHz clock, could be more productive and powerful than a desktop computer, so long as YOU get to choose the reference computer, but claim that such devices are not good for productivity! Or further claim that Your 1 megapixel plastic lens phone camera, displaying just 64k colors on an old tech screen, somehow out-performs a 2 megapixel Zeiss made glass lens camera displaying 262,144 colors at twice the resolution on an entirely new tech screen with 179 degree field of view. Or, your assertion that the phone market did not change following Apple’s introduction of the iconic iPhone design, with all phones now essentially mimicking the iPhone’s look, feel, and operational concepts. Only rabidly blind fans of the competing followers—those who want history to be other than it is—are those who are refusing to see it for what it factually and in reality is.
Such claims are, on their face, delusional. I’m not going to cure your delusions, so I’m going to stop trying, because you refuse to see facts in front of your face, preferring your opinions and your delusional version of history. Fine. Live in fantasyland.