Yeah, they lacked by being harder to use than a dumbphone. Their main differentiator over regular phones was that they had buttons from A-Z instead of 0-9. A little easier for text input and nothing more. It's even questionable if the first iPhone was a true smartphone as it didn't ship with the App Store. Every phone we consider a smartphone today traces back to the iPhone 3G. It's no coincidence that Nokia, Palm, Blackberry are bankrupt today, neither of them could offer something similar to the iPhone, which is indeed NOT EVEN A PHONE. It's a category of handheld multipurpose computer. Just like smartwatches are NOT EVEN WATCHES. They are wearable multipurpose computers. Both can make calls and tell the time. The name of the thing, which used to describe its functionality, now only describes the form factor of a computer with an OS, which supports all kinds of functions.
Those are PDAs,
personal digital assistants. Which just proves that the term smartphone is completely arbitrary. If one of those early ancestors had been successful in creating a vibrant app market, than smartphones would be called
smartassistants today. And smartwatches also connect over the phone network. Their only connection to watches is that they occupy a spot on the wrist where a watch used to be. That's like calling TVs
visualcabinets or
smartpictures.
Humans need to come up with names for new things all the time and the easiest way is to just change the meaning of an old word, everybody already knows how to spell. But that doesn't indicate prior invention. Take
cars from Latin
carrus/carrum "wheeled vehicle". Karl Benz invented the machine which we call a car. We wouldn't consider any unmotorised cart to be a car. The chariot races in ancient Rome and war chariots in ancient Egypt do not diminish his invention.
Fish are predecessors of humans, everything comes from the big bang. It's still useful to name specific things like smartphones and distinguish them form early smartphone and things that aren't smartphones at all, like dumbphones with more buttons.
It's never going to be 100% Apple design. Purity is a myth. At some point you just consider it an development led by your own design team, who chose PowerVR SGX535 over something else. Invention is the integration of other people's ideas into something new, which you call the iPhone 4. Remember the A4 doesn't even exist as a standalone product. You can only make use of it within the first Retina smartphone. It's properties as a chip are completely theoretical. Other smartphone makers could've used the same CPU and GPU cores and never be able to create a device with the same performance.
Yeah, but nobody said architecture. It's their own in-house designed chip. They didn't order the A4 from someone else, who conceptualised it for a 960×640 pixel smartphone.
And the GPU wasn't a custom design, so why do you dare to call the A6 an Apple-designed chip? You make up an arbitrary threshold of own intellectual input and decide the A6 exceeded it and the A4 didn't.
Apple still hasn't purchased TSMC and TSMC hasn't purchased ASML. So maybe it's a Dutch chip after all? The point is beginning with the A4 they had a chip design team led by Johny Srouji.
Wikipedia:Johny_Srouji#Career
In 2008, Srouji led development of the Apple A4, the first Apple-designed system on a chip.[15]
Of course they invented the GUI, but not the PC with a GUI. This makes them to what Otto Lilienthal is for the Brother's Wright. He came up with the wing design which creates uplift, but he didn't invent the first steerable, continuously flying, motorized, heavier than air, aircraft. And the later one is an incredibly useful flying machine the modern world couldn't do without. Whereas the former one developed into this:
Sometimes you've got to give it to the Americans that they came up with something useful.
Which is what invention means. Otherwise congratulation Otto Lilienthal, you've invented the airplane years after your deadly accident! 🏆 ✈️ 🥇
Not by me. Microsoft's only invention was software licensing. Bill Gates bought Q-DOS for 10.000 USD after he had sold it to IBM for 186.000 USD and retained the right to sell it again to other people. And then I think Adobe were the first to charge you every month. Not as clever as the phone companies, who charge you be the second. Microsoft tried to be a truly innovative company, they desperately wanted to make tablets, terminals, video calls and mobile payments a thing. And it never led to more than aspirational videos of how the future would be.
There is no need to mention any of them. And I had a Casio calculator watch in the 80s.
Nonsense. In fact they quickly lose market share in all markets they themselves invented. They are the innovators, who open up a new market and with luck they manage to haul in the lion's share of the profits by defending a premium segment among dozens of cheaper copycats, who sell more units and appear to be dominant market leaders.
That's certainly not what he did, when he stood on that stage and claimed, he reinvented the phone. The iPhone is not a phone. It replaced the phone and bankrupted all mobile phone makers that had existed prior. The iPad is not an improved slate or plate. No tablet market existed before. They were aspirational attempts at creating a computer in a tablet form factor, but so were aircraft designs that couldn't fly prior to the Wrights. And as Columbus demonstrated, once someone showed them how to do it, everyone can make a boiled egg stand upright.
A lot of the Lenovo business can be configured that way.
www.wareable.com
www.engadget.com
