What irks me in particular about the iphone is the sheer number of luddites out there who say it’s revolutionary. It’s not. Everything from the touchscreen to the UI to the idea of  third party apps on a phone has all been done before. If the iphone had come out in 1999 I would have said wow but these days it compares to some of its predecessors like a cheap chinese knockoff does to an iphone itself.

So a history lesson is in order. Read on for a brief history of the (touchscreen) smart phone

In the beginning

Photo Courtesy of Digitalbear@flickr

It all began back in the early 80’s when Casio not content with making cheap calculator watches decided to release a calculator that also stored names, phone numbers and addresses. The first electronic organiser. It’s also when the controversy began as other companies  such as Psion have laid claim to being the first to produce a PDA or electronic organiser as they were known in the day.

The first PDAs

Apple themselves deserve a big pat on the back when it comes to the development of the PDA. The Apple Newton was launched in 1994 and was definitely a device ahead of its time. Some might say  it even sparked the PDA revolution. However, with weak sales and Apple facing bankruptcy Steve Jobs was called back to save the company, promptly cancelling the Newton.

Palm was the company that made the PDA a commercial success with the launch of its Palm Pilot in 1996. They dominated the market for close to a decade even with the likes of Microsoft entering it.

The smart phone

Nokia 7710 courtesy of tnkgrl@flickr

A smart phone is essentially a PDA mashed with a mobile phone. Who exactly made the first smart phone just like who made the first PDA is a point of contention. Suffice to say it wasn’t Apple. Nokia certainly made the first widely available and (somewhat) affordable smart phone the Nokia Communicator back in 1996. You could probably say that the Visor Phone – an addon for the Palm Pilot was the grand daddy of the iphone. However it was the short lived Nokia 7710 which truly launched the current generation of large touchscreen, multimedia smartphones. The market that Apple leads today.

This phone although long made a dinosaur in the technology department stil holds its ground against the iphone and has many features that iphone owners are still waiting for … five years later.

Where Apple did innovate was in the distribution of applications. Before the iphone you had to buy or download your applications from the software developers direct. Or from aggregators. They were often priced at or just below the equivalent desktop application. People just didn’t want to pay the price and as such there was little motivation to develop applications. Most people made use of what came with their phone.

Next time someone spouts on about how revolutionary their iphone is put them in their place. It’s just another smart phone in a long line of phones.

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Blend food

Take your turtle for a walk

Taste wines for you

Light your cigarette

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News has just come out that an employee of one of Apple’s contractors has committed suicide after being treated poorly. In fact very unfairly.

Sun Danyong apparently lept to his death because he was afraid of what his bosses would do to him after having misplaced a prototype iphone.  Now this in itself may seem like a freak coincidence, perhaps the the acts of a mentally disturbed man but if you look at the events leading up to and surrounding his death you get a very different picture.

After noticing that a phone was missing Sun did the right thing and reported it to his boss. Two days later three employees of Apple’s contractor forcefully and illegally searched his house. There are also allegations flying around that Sun was detained and beaten.

This is nothing new, Apple’s contractor – Foxconn has been accused of everything from forcing employees to work 15 hour days, 7 days a week through to imprisoning employees in dormitories.

Apple are well aware of the issues and in the past have “investigated” claims but nothing has ever been done to correct them. They are responsible for the welfare of these people. I don’t care if the companies are contracted or not. They are accountable to Apple but Apple does not feel accountable to the world’s laws. Even the Dickensian laws of China.

What really gets to me is that much of the noise on the blogosphere around this particular story is not about how poorly the employee was treated but rather around the fact that there could be a fourth generation iphone out on the loose. Which quite frankly disguists me and so should it digust you.

Think twice about how you want your fellow men treated before you buy another Apple product.

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What I mean by this is that there is just one iphone phone. It’s big, black (sometimes white), has a 3.5inch touch screen and for lots of people it’s just not what they want.

That’s why other phone manufacturers make lots of different handsets. They know that some people want a candy bar phone, some want a messenger with a QWERTY keyboard and others want a large 3.5 inch touchscreen. Hey, some people even want a touch screen and keyboard.

Before I continue I know the fanboys will say “But why would you want anything else? It’s perfect”. Well that is the answer I’ve come to expect from your typical iphone advocate.  It seems that if the iphone doesn’t do it you don’t want it. If the iphone does do it then Apple got there first and everyone else is copying them. I will simply counter that by saying that one size does not fit all. No matter how hard you try to stuff an elephant into a telephone box. It’s never going to fit. People want flexibility and choice.

Apple don’t want to expand their range and we all know why. It means work, lots more work. You would need to more than double the amount of people employed in design, engineering and manufacturing. It means they would have to become … a phone maker.

The concept of an iphone nano or shuffle is nothing new and people have either been predicting them or doing some creative designs for them ever since the iphone first came out.

Here’s some of the most interesting fan designs:

If Apple were to listen and either make a line up of iphones or license out the platform to hardware manufacturers what format phone would you like to see?

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An automatic upgrade to wordpress overwrote the themes on the site. It now looks like the wordpress default. Either that or Steve Jobs is god and he can destroy those who oppose him.

Service will be restored soon. In the meantime, please read the articles. Same content. They just don’t look as pretty.

Update: Service has mainly been restored. Thanks for your patience. Especially all those fanboys who can’t wait to get straight back into picking the blog apart.

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