Samsung Copied the iPhone and Simply “Put a Bigger Screen around It,” Claims Apple Executive

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Samsung's popular Galaxy phones probably wouldn't exist in their current form if it weren't for Apple, according to the company's marketing chief, Greg Joswiak, who is featured in a new documentary shared by The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern today that highlights the evolution of the iPhone ahead of the iconic device's 15th anniversary.

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And lg thinks apple stole it from them, so there. The fact that touchscreens got so much better, its really what dictates these slabs of glass. Nothing more.
 
Wait you're telling me that an APPLE funded and produced documentary about THEIR product casts them in some kind of positive light about everything. Wow then it MUST be true.
 
And lg thinks apple stole it from them, so there. The fact that touchscreens got so much better, its really what dictates these slabs of glass. Nothing more.
Nah, It's more than just the touchscreen.

The touchscreen was a regression compared to phones of the day - it sucked, and still does really. It was compared against the Blackberry keyboard and found, by most, pretty inferior - and I certainly agree. The original screen was horrible (320x480) with washed out color, it was a bitch to try to use the on-screen keyboard without tactical feedback, and it was limited to EDGE data connection if you weren't on WiFi -- which was slower than most dialup connections. Just looking at the hardware, the first iPhone was an absolute joke.

The biggest phones at the time were Blackberry, which had most of the corporate users nailed down, and the various flip phones, which more or less peaked with the Motorola Razer, but Nokia and others had a huge lineup that was very popular as well. Phones at the time were all about miniaturizing (re: Zoolander). PDAs such as Palm Pilots were still fairly popular at the time, pretty much anyone that didn't have a Blackberry at the workplace probably had a Palm. And the iPod and other music players were all over the place, it was the heyday of the MP3 player.

There were two things that really differentiated the iPhone from everything else. Apart from that, it was basically a phone + iPod + PDA, and that's almost exactly how Steve Jobs introduced it. It boils down to the confluence of several portable devices that already existed, with the capability to have a persistent and ubiquitous cellular data connection.

It had a full blown web browser. It supported javascript and web apps and pretty much everything, except famously, Flash. At the time, phones were routing web pages through "mobile only" filters or gateways, and it was horrible and mangled the pages and the experience. It wasn't the mobile internet, or web lite, it was ~The Internet~.

The second was visual voicemail. This was such a small thing, but very impactful. You may recall, you used to have to listen to voicemail in order, and all you got was the audio message - you didn't really get any metadata with it (it may have existed on some platforms, but it was hardly universal). It wasn't until the iPhone that your voice mails were presented as a list, you could listen out of order, it would show the Caller ID and time, and you could just manage them using an intuitive visual interface - not some robocall dial-in system.

It also had a GPS and the Maps app - which pretty much killed all casual Garmin GPS devices. And it had a camera, although it sucked at the time - it wasn't until later that those really took off and it killed off the casual camera market. And the iPod, as I mentioned before, which killed off the MP3 player market. But all of these were existing devices, the iPhone just put them all together in one package.

You could make the case, with a straight face, that the iPhone, with it's constant data connectivity, is what pulled the music industry away from album sales and into a streaming model - despite the fact that at the time Apple was the largest distributor of music sales, and it killed it's own market with a device that could stream in your pocket, without requiring you to be home or on a wifi network.

It wasn't until much later that the App Store came about. Initially, Apple wanted all developers to push apps via a web interface, and had given hooks to a lot of various hardware via special Safari javascript APIs. But you couldn't get actual hardware-level access until the App Store came about.

Then it somehow became a race as to who could put a bigger camera on the thing. I don't know when that came about.
 
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