Genuine question.

I know they were the scrappy startup doing different cool things. But, what are the most major innovative things that they introduced, improved or just implemented that either revolutionized, improved or spurred change?

I am aware of the possibility of both fanboys and haters just duking it out below. But there’s always that one guy who has a fkn well-formatted paragraph of gold. I await that guy.

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
    712·
    10 months ago

    The first Android was made about 1999.

    I was using a Treo with a touch screen before iPhones existed.

    I had deployed thousands of Palm Pilots with wifi access, and then Treos, which synced to a desktop app, in the early 2000s.

    Smartphones weren’t a new idea, Palm had been on it since the mid 90’s, just waiting for the phone tech to be small enough to pack into a Palm Pilot.

    • kirklennon@kbin.social
      91·
      10 months ago

      The first Android was made about 1999/2000, I’d read about it in a trade mag just before I was laid off from one company (they provided that trade mag, which is why I know the date). The idea of running Linux for a phone OS was intriguiging at the tomr, as we were doing some Linux testing ourselves.

      Android as a company was created in 2003 with no product at all. They started working on a phone operating system in 2005, were acquired by Google, and then had an early prototype Blackberry knockoff in 2006. The iPhone was announced in 2007 so they abandoned the original plans and started making an iPhone knockoff. The first Android phone was released in 2008.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.worldEnglish
      82·
      10 months ago

      Smartphones weren’t a new idea, Palm had been on it since the mid 90’s

      Apple shipped the Newton in 1993. Well before Palm. And long, long, before shipping the Newton they were talking about hand held computers. The idea that they copied Palm is ridiculous.

      Like Palm, the Newton wasn’t good enough to achieve widespread market adoption (and Apple recognised that - killing it in 1998).

      Sure - iPhone wasn’t the first pocket computer and it was a very obvious invention that companies all over the world had failed to pull off for decades. I think Microsoft was the closest - their Pocket PC that was pretty good and they had a massive decade long version almost rebuilt from scratch about to ship when the iPhone came out… But Apple beat them to it and Google followed close behind - reportedly Google’s early hardware partners were planning to ship Windows on those devices but Microsoft lost out on the contract negotiations, Satya Nadela said they were just too slow - their hardware partners want to wait for them.

      Apple was first to ship a good pocket computer. That was real innovation. Real innovators are the ones that get it right, and being first (to get it right) matters because once it’s done once everyone else can just copy your idea instead of wasting time developing and testing dead end solutions to hard problems. The early Android devices for example, looked more like the old Pocket PC or a Blackberry. They probably weren’t good enough to be successful. They quickly copied ideas like the software keyboard from Apple, and quickly adopted Apple’s open source technology like the WebKit rendering engine.