this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Which phone? The word "smartphone" has been bandied about since the nineties, but 2007's iPhone was really the first of the species we now typically refer to as "smartphones."
Siemens EF81.
Feature-wise roughly comparable to the first IPhone.
Internet/Mail/Office stuff, installable apps, multimedia and camera, gaming.
As you already said, smartphones have been around since the late 90s/early 00s, with constantly increasing functionality. Even if people today wouldn't directly recognize them as such, as the typical formfactor has changed during the late 00s.
No full Internet access, extremely limited selection of applications solely provided by the vendor, keypad input. Cameras and audio playback were already standard on cell phones by then. Definitely wouldn't call that a smartphone.
That's not true. Full internet access, also for installed apps and unusual protocols, and any app supporting the right Java features could be installed (I had some OSS ones and even ones out of the competing Nokia store - I think they had a nice calculator app...)
Actually, these points would apply much more to the IPhone 1, as you could only install apps from their store and it had crippled connectivity (vividly remember a friend who had it constantly complaining about the speed because of missing UMTS, among other things).
You are right insofar, as I would not tread it as a smartphone by todays standards.
But neither would l tread the IPhone 1 as one.
And yet both were in 2007.
Standards change... 🤷♂️
Like its contemporaries, that phone only had limited support for websites, handling only those that presented XHTML-MP.
The iPhone pretty clearly revolutionized the whole market, with the App Store opening the following year.
No, it also supportedl standard html. And not just in theory, I routinely visited such pages with the phone. Limiting factor was rather the screen size here, sometimes leading to strangely rendered pages. But there already existed smartphones with bigger screens, eg. the Nokia communicators, which didn't have that specific issue.
Yes, the IPhone revolutionized the market, especially because it turned the old distribution models upside-down (which the established manufacturers were in no position to do).
But purely from a technical standpoint it was nothing completely special. Some things were better, some things worse than for other phones.
The symbian phones were typically much better from the classical technical standpoint.
Windows CE devices had superior versatility.
Blackberry was optimized for business integration.
But all high-end devices were "smartphones" at that stage.
The capacitive touchscreen alone was definitely something special.
For sure. Although l think the actual remarkable point is how it had been utilized.
There are reasons these were not in wide use yet. I remember discussing using a capacitive touchscreen for a project in 2004 already. We settled for a resistive one, as the effort to adept the existing SW to a capacitive one would have been too great.
Apple didn't have this technical debt and could design its stuff from the ground up to fit the new input method. And it did that exceptionally well, which is part of the reason for its success.
But the means of input isn't what made a smartphone smart.
So, coming back to the original premise, I could even still have a 25 year old smartphone package, if I e.g. had owned a Siemens SX45 back then (I had a SL45i, which also was almost, but in reality not quite, a smartphone)