By Jeffrey Sass
Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife
As anticipation ramps up for the arrival of the iPhone 5 this fall, let's take a moment to wish a happy birthday to the iPhone itself. It hit the market four years ago this week.
It's stunning to think how different life was before smartphones, and even though Apple wasn't first to market with one, its product has changed the category and consumer behavior in profound ways. On June 29, 2007, the company formerly known as Apple Computer introduced its combination of a pocket computer and a phone, a move that would do for the mobile phone what the iPod had done for the MP3 player.
The iPhone has been the catalyst of explosive growth in the smartphone market and created an app economy that has sown the seeds of new industries and changed the face of gaming, social communications, location-based services and photography as well as advertising and commerce.
Just about every year since 2000 has promised to be the year of mobile, as more and more of our daily life has come to revolve around our handheld companions. Today we think of the smartphone as revolutionary, but in truth it has been an evolution. The mobile web was around long before the iPhone came calling. So were touch screens and even apps. Remember the Palm Treo? Once the iPhone was introduced, with all the flair, style and beauty that are at the core of Apple, its success was driven not solely by technology but also by how technology was used to present a new view of what a mobile device could be. Its simple, elegant, exciting approach lured in consumers and finally altered their mobile behavior.
It opened their eyes to how fun, easy and productive using the mobile web and a mobile phone could be. Although the iPhone was not the first, it was unquestionably the best, and it forced an entire industry to get better. Sometimes we forget that there was a lot of great, capable consumer-focused mobile technology in the days and years before the iPhone. Many of the things that seem to be just rising to the surface today were actually readily available at the beginning of the decade. Mobile commerce, comparative shopping on your phone, mobile bar codes and more all existed and in many cases worked quite well. The problem was that nobody used them. The consumer didn't care. For mobile to finally take charge, technology didn't have to change as much as consumer behavior had to change, and in late June 2007 the iPhone became the change agent for the mobile masses.
Consumers quickly embraced the phone's large, sharp and colorful touch screen and elegantly intuitive icon-based interface. Perhaps for the first time, browsing the web on a phone was, well, like browsing the web. Mobile Safari made it a snap. To compete, every phone manufacturer had to rethink its approach to mobile web browsing. Then they all had to react again when the iPhone put apps on the map. There had been thousands of handheld apps for Palm and Windows Mobile platforms before, but it took Apple and its structured iOS platform to turn mobile app developer into a calling that one could not only be proud of but get rich from. Taking the lead from Apple, virtually every other significant mobile platform has jumped headfirst into the iPhone-style app marketplace.
Among the technical innovations that have been important to the iPhone's behavior-changing success, the use of a large capacitive touch screen instead of the then more common resistive touch screen was a bold move, as was replacing the oft-lost stylus with our more unfailingly available fingers. Things we now take for granted in a smartphone, like accelerometers and autocorrecting software keyboards, were far more novel when the iPhone arrived.
Because Apple struck a nerve (and gold) with the iPhone, consumers finally became comfortable relying on their mobile phones for much of their information and entertainment. Activities that they had performed solely on their desktops were suddenly happening on their phones.
The rest of the industry could not sit by. As a result, whether you use an Android device or another phone made by HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc., you have Apple and the iPhone to thank for raising the proverbial bar, pushing the proverbial envelope and instigating a vibrant, exciting and culture-changing mobile ecosystem. iPhone apps sparked the popularity of location-based services like Foursquare and Yelp and helped Pandora rise from near death to become a darling of Wall Street. New businesses and business models have emerged to make the most of the personal location information and social communication so easily shared through iPhone apps, and the successful ones have spread across all smartphone platforms.
As for the mobile web browsing experience, pinching and zooming made us pinch ourselves and say, "Wow." As other manufacturers followed with their own smarter smartphones to keep up with the iPhone Joneses, consumers started jonesing for more mobile web—and mobile companies like my own saw the start of a period of ongoing dramatic growth in mobile-web activity and traffic.
With the iPhone as a benchmark, Google developed the Android platform and won the support of highly competitive handset manufacturers. Handset options for consumers exploded, and smartphone adoption soared. Since the introduction of the iPhone, companies like ours have seen tangible shifts in activity from the web to the mobile web
Jeffrey Sass is the vice president for marketing for the mobile entertainment website Myxer.com.
