As almost all the world’s smartphone manufacturers and tech press flew out to Barcelona this past weekend to get ready for Mobile World Congress this week, Chris Matyszczyk highlighted an important message about Apple from CEO Tim Cook and his interview with Fast Company entitled 'Why Apple Is The World’s Most Innovative Company’:
Cook explained that the mere suggestion that Apple follows misunderstands how the company is run.
"What's happening if you look under the sheets, which we probably don't let people do, is that we start projects years before they come out," he said. "You could take every one of our products -- iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch -- they weren't the first, but they were the first modern one, right?"
Ah, so modern is the opposite of, say, Samsung? Do I have that right?
Assuming that principle holds true across the board, all the innovations, new ideas, and left-field thinking that will be on show at MWC this week are already in Apple’s labs with a great big ‘First!’ sticker on them? The question for many is not necessarily about who came up with the idea first (or at least got tot he Patent office first) but who gets it to market first. Once something hits the market, then even the slightest sidestep or implementation will allow every manufacturer to implement the idea, and then something that was once a ‘genuine’ first for ‘Company N’ becomes a standard feature’ for every other company.
But if you can make the market believe that you have something genuinely new, even though it’s already out there, then you can command a price premium, then you can command a devoted following, and then you can leave them in the labs just a little bit longer. Why bother being first on paper when you can be first in thought?
So, with a touch of irony, here are some historical ‘greatest hits’ on the iPhone that felt spookily familiar to those following the smartphone industry.
1. Online App Stores
Let’s start off with the big one, and that’s applications. The idea of iPhones and apps is one that is pretty much cemented in lore, even though the initial pitch was that apps had to be web apps - if I had to speculate Apple knew third-party apps would happen but the system wash;t ready so they prevaricated.
But what about the App Store revolutionising distribution? Well Nokia got there two years before the iPhone was announced, with an online store to sell and distribute gaming apps for the N-Gage system over its Symbian Series 60 devices.
2. Removing The Physical Home Button
Brave and visionary to remove the home button? A new way of using a smartphone? Unless you’ve used a low- or mid-ranged Android smartphone in the last decade, where the button is removed to save on the bill of materials. What’s used? A software-based set of buttons on-screen that can be locked in place or slid up with a quick thumb-swipe.
3. Gesture Support
No home button on the iPhone X? No worries, make a special movement on the screen and you can have the same effect as pressing the home button. Gesture support was going to change everything Let’s not mention that the Nokia N9 launched in 2011 with gestures to replace the home button and to call up the task manager in Meego OS. Let’s not mention that this was improved when the core of the OS made its way to Jolla and Sailfish OS.
4. Copy and Paste
Not needed at launch. Not thought about. iPhone was a brand new way of working compared to every other computing device in recent memory…
…it arrived two years later in iOS 3.
5. Bright And Vivid OLED Screens
The iPhone X is Apple’s first smartphone with an OLED screen, providing deeper blacks, more vibrant colors, and more efficient use of power. It’s a breakthrough technology that’s been available to smartphone manufacturers for well over a decade - here’s a late-period Symbian, the N85, debuting an OLED screen in 2008.
6. Face Unlock
The Windows Hello package allowed facial recognition and unlock on Windows 10 for Mobile, and various systems of unlocking handsets with your visual biometrics have been available on smartphones long before Apple debuted Face ID on the iPhone X.
To be fair to Apple, this is a good example of the idea that Apple waits to do something in a ‘better' way than others. By using additional hardware it can map a face using infra-red, rather than the selfie camera, and thus offer more accuracy. It also shows the ability of Apple to drown out everyone pointing to previous solutions that offer the same functionality.
7. Wireless Charging
And then the implementation of wireless charging shows that Apple can dress up something in fancy words and phrases, it’s still going to follow the pack with the same technology. Inductive charging through the Qi standard has been around since the Lumia 920 (2012) and the Palm Pre (albeit using Touchstone rather than Qi).
Apple’s implementation of wireless charging in the iPhone 8 family and iPhone X handsets uses the same hardware standards as every other handset, yet Tim Cook couldn’t resist teasing that a proprietary system would be along when Apple released its own charging stations. First with wireless charging? Far from it.
8. Water Resistance
Although tear downs of earlier iPhones suggested that Apple had water protection built-in, it wasn’t until the iPhone 7 that IP67 protection was confirmed for the smartphones. It's a useful feature, as well as providing peace of mind, but like many of the bullet points it had already become established on high-end Android devices. Unlike other features though, Apple didn’t improve this it was ‘meets IP67’ just like the competition.
9. Hey Siri
And of course the great voice control battle, which has Siri at the heart of the mobile solution, did not start with Cupertino’s silky smooth voice reacting to “Hey Siri!” Everyone with the first Moto X device in 2013 was already shouting “Okay Google” at their handsets two years previously.
Sometimes it’s not about being first, sometimes it’s about making everyone think that you are out at the front of the innovation battle. Apple has perfected that approach over time, but there comes a point when every handset, no matter the platform, offers the same package of features, and the market starts to look for true innovation to increase handset sales.
