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Thursday, January 9, 2014

The Apple iPhone first appeared seven years ago

Mark Bridge writes:

In a way, it’s hard to believe that the first Apple iPhone wasn’t seen in public until this day seven years ago. It - and the trend towards one-piece smartphones with hardly any buttons - seems to have been with us for much longer.

Yet it was 9th January 2007 when Apple CEO Steve Jobs walked on stage at at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco and announced “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone”. The USA then had to wait until June for the phone to go on sale, selling a million units in 74 days. UK sales begin in November 2007, with the phone (2 megapixel camera, 3.5-inch display and a maximum 8GB of memory) costing £269 on an O2 contract.

But the iPhone wasn’t Apple’s first move into mobile communications. In 2005 the Motorola ROKR E1 had gone on sale. Although it didn’t bear the Apple name, it had been produced in partnership with Apple, was capable of linking with iTunes on a PC and had music controls that were familiar to anyone with an Apple iPod. Unfortunately, the relatively small memory and lack of features when compared to dedicated MP3 players meant the E1 didn’t sell as well as expected.

In fact, the Apple iPhone wasn’t even the world’s first smartphone with a full-length touch-controlled screen. Many would suggest that honour went to the LG Prada KE850, which was announced a week after the iPhone and went on sale in May 2007... while others would point to the stylus-operated IBM Simon from 1993.

However, it’s the success of iPhone that’s changed the way millions of people think about technology. And with $10 billion spent on downloadable apps in the Apple App Store last year, the iPhone is clearly here to stay. For a while, at least.

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Author: The Fonecast
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1 comments on article "The Apple iPhone first appeared seven years ago"

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Ashley James

1/10/2014 3:21 PM

Apple has gone from an innovative company, to an ordinary company. The companies primary focus seems to be "how to sue Samsung" This is also reflected in margins

http://bit.ly/AppleRevenueBreakDown

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Opinion Articles

f u cn rd ths thn wts th prblm?

Iain Graham writes:

Text language. Why do they do it?  What an interesting question!  Normally asked by people who have never ever sent a text, believing it to be the invention of the devil!! "Texters are vandals, doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago" asserted Jhn (sorry) John Humphrys of Radio Four fame writing in the Daily Mail. The new 'text language' has been blamed for many things including...

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Is Google’s new mobile phone distribution model really a big deal for the UK?

Mark Bridge writes:

“Google offers New Model for Consumers to buy a Mobile Phone”. Not my words but those of Vodafone as it announced it was the first operator to bring the new Google phone offer to Europe.

There’s a lot of talk about Google’s online ordering process for its Nexus One smartphone… or ‘superphone’ as the company described it at yesterday’s launch.

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Mobile shopping is worrying... and usually successful

Mark Bridge writes:

I really don’t like to complain. Honestly, I don’t. I’m an optimist. True, I can be a bit of a cynic – but that’s because I like to see things work first time.

So when I saw a headline that said “Shopping via mobile phone causes concerns for consumers”, I wasn’t surprised. Disappointed but not surprised.

And then I looked closer – and I got annoyed. Not annoyed at the companies that make mobile shopping so disappointing. No, annoyed at the organisation that published the report.

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Is mobile technology too young to predict?

Mark Bridge writes:

“Leave them alone, they’re just kids”

My word, Anakin Skywalker was a smart boy. Child prodigy. Wunderkind. Genius, some would say, albeit fictional.

But, without the benefit of hindsight (or the Star Wars box set, as many would call it), very few people would have expected him to marry his babysitter, fall into a volcano, turn to the Dark Side and end up looking like the late Sebastian Shaw.

Which brings me to the mobile phone industry.

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Did 2009 turn out the way we expected?

Mark Bridge writes:

At this time of year it’s something of a tradition – certainly within the mobile industry – to make predictions for the year ahead. It’s a trend we’ve followed with The Fonecast… and we’ve done reasonably well over the last few years.

We’ll be making this year’s predictions for 2010 in our programme on 23rd December. Ahead of that, I’ve been listening to our last show of 2008 to see what we thought 2009 would hold for us.

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