1. Five Years

    Beside my desk, there’s a drawer. In it are some gadgets: three Palm Pre devices, two iPods, an iPhone 3G and most treasured of all, my original iPhone. From time to time, I’ll take it out. Remind myself of its cold aluminium shell. The plastic antenna cover, the light far-less dense body compared with its seemingly-vacuum-packed 4S-branded successor. The screen that’s just a shade beneath the glass. The square switches in iOS that already feel so alien, the metal dock. The Voice Memos icon.1 The fact that the device doesn’t do folders for apps, and that for a while it didn’t even do apps.

    It’s five years to the day2 since the iPhone was first announced. Half a decade. All things considered, it’s truly amazing that for a piece of kit so seemingly old in its industry, the original iPhone still fascinates me. Over the last few weeks I’ve been wondering what it was that captivated me, when later in 2007 I was finally able to get my hands on one. All I can say is that, for a device that had so many spec-sheet shortcomings, the iPhone felt considered. It was the first mobile phone I owned that I actually loved to use. The compromise and expense of the iPhone made sense when you used it. All the small details, the finish, the joy at how it worked. How great it was to use a phone that had been tested, considered and used by the people who built it.

    In the months after its launch, I got to know my iPhone pretty well. I commuted 2 hours each way by train to the office, cursing the lack of 3G in the device on a rail route that to this day still doesn’t have 3G.

    The original iPhone was built on a different set of compromises to the competition - how it worked was (at least to begin with) more important than everything that it did. Say what you will about the empirically-lacking feature set: it all seems to have turned out pretty well.

    1. The screenshot is circa iPhone OS 2.0 alongside iOS 5.0.1 - as far back as my LittleSnapper library goes, alas. Thankfully, Florian has a grab of Apple.com back in January 2007 ↩

    2. You can grab the Macworld 2007 keynote from Apple’s Keynote feed ↩

    Posted on Monday January 9th, 2012