10 | MANE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY | SEPTEMBER 2017
Ten Things iPhone Changed
1 Smartphone Design
Do you know someone with an iPhone? If you said no, then you’re lying to yourself. It’s likely that you’ve got an iPhone at arm’s reach as you’re reading this and if it’s not an iPhone, it’s a device that was heavily influenced by it. It’s hard to imagine what life was like before our world with touch screen devices that are essentially full-fledged computers in our pockets. These days, anything you can do on your computer, you can likely do on your mobile device.
It was just 10 years ago when Blackberry was dominating the smartphone market that was filled with phones with built-in keyboards that took up nearly half the front of the device. When the iPhone was announced in January 2007 it changed the way smartphones looked and everything else as well. Have a look at the pre-iPhone smartphones on the market and you’ll see that they’re vastly different to the smartphones after the iPhone was originally released. There’s a common theme about most phones released after 2007, the keyboard and buttons are replaced with a single sheet of glass that acts as the buttons, keyboard and overall user interface. The device shaped the mobile industry and help create brand new ones as well.
The way phones look in 2017 is not the only thing the iPhone influenced. The effects of the original release of the iPhone and its on-going developments to the device are more far-reaching. On the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, we look at 10 things the iPhone changed.
Apple did not invent the smartphone, but it did reinvent what the smartphone was. No matter how you feel about Apple, you can’t deny that Apple paved the way for the modern smartphone era. As we had mentioned earlier, smartphones in the era before the iPhone were vastly different to the ones we see today. The addition of a touch screen on the iPhone set a path for other mobile phone manufacturers to follow. Samsung, who’s been making mobile phones for decades, went in a completely different direction after the iPhone was released. Their popular Galaxy line was directly influenced by the iPhone – gone were the number keys, the keyboard and introduced was a single sheet of glass, the touch screen. And while Samsung is now pushing the boundaries of the smartphone (quite literally removing the bezels of their new Galaxy S8 devices), it was Apple that helped get them to where they are today.