• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 4th, 2025

help-circle

  • Using TCL/Tk and Qt based apps on smartphones with a stylus was a pain in the butt in my experience.

    You probably mean Windows Phone, not mobile. Yes, Windows Phone 7 and 8 on Nokia phone were really compelling.

    Being able to scroll and zoom real websites smoothly on a phone, instead of having to use crappy WAP was huge.

    This meant lots of people were getting an iPhone as their first smartphone.

    The iPhone succeeded initially because of ease of use. Of course Apple‘s brand image played a role as well. When it came out it was 1000 US$, making it more expensive than other phones. So it instantly became a status symbol.

    Ease of use and status meant the executives of corporations started to demand their IT departments make the iPhone work with their Microsoft based networks and such.

    Later on Apple started supporting corporate features and mobile device management for corporations really well. Corporate IT loves iPhones because of the great management options, the limited range of models, and long support with software updates. Once Apple had a foot in corporate, their success became cemented.


  • Their stuff was significantly worse in user experience. Buttery smooth scrolling and highly reactive multi touch on a touch screen only device was revolutionary. Touch screens back then were known to be shitty to use. The competition to the iPhone were phones with tons of buttons, styluses and cumbersome user interfaces.

    All previous players in the smartphone market Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, Windows mobile were slow to adapt and failed.

    Palm’s webOS was competitive to iOS and in many ways superior. It failed because of mediocre hardware, bad carrier deals, and running out of money too quickly.

    Google‘s Android succeeded despite sucking until about version 4 by willpower and deep pockets from Google.

    The original introduction keynote for the iPhone was mindblowing back then.