The iPhone celebrates its fifteenth anniversary on January 9. In 2007, that same day, Apple CEO Steve Jobs presented the brand’s very first smartphone. A launch that would revolutionize the concept of interface and applications. Since then, Apple has sold several billion smartphones, but has also inspired all the competition, especially Android at Google.
The first iPhone was clearly the starting point of a great revolution. A revolution that saw the light of day at the Macworld conference in San Francisco in 2007. Steve Jobs, who was in charge of all the presentations at the time, explained in the introduction that he wanted to integrate a phone function into your iPod in order to combine several technologies. However, this is not enough for him, he also wanted users to have a big screen in order to view their photos, surf the internet and much more. He then had the idea of using a touch screen, which was more intuitive and more efficient. And that changes everything.
15 years ago, the iPhone changed telephony… and Apple!
From this idea therefore emerged the first true modern smartphone. A smartphone which celebrated its fifteenth anniversary this weekend. An event that took place this Sunday January 9, 2022. We are celebrating this anniversary in our columns because it has greatly contributed to making telephony what it is today. The smartphone concept already existed before with BlackBerry or Windows mobile. But the original iPhone introduced several important concepts: fully tactile interface and application store. This is what will change the situation.
For a new kind of smartphone, the iPhone sold quite well at the time, with 6.1 million units sold between June 2007 and July 2008. It is however far from equaling the sales figures of its many successors. In comparison, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus sold at 222 million copies, the best score for iPhones so far. Despite this figure which may seem disappointing, the first iPhone paved the way for the following ones, making the iPhone the most popular products and placing its designer at the rank of essential multinational. More than two billion iPhones have been sold since 2007. And Apple is worth more than $ 3 trillion on the stock market.
Internet, mail, browsing … the 10 real innovations of the original iPhone
By combining three devices (an iPod, a navigation device and a phone) into one, Apple has developed a revolutionary device. Several technological and ergonomic innovations have been created for the iPhone. Here are the most striking:
- A 100% tactile interface, made of icon and widgets. Each application opens instantly with your finger. Each application is used with the finger, eliminating the stylus. And a full virtual keyboard appears to write in search areas or to write a message. Just swipe in one direction to browse a document, list, or site. Apple is also developing notification dots that alert the user if a new message has arrived in text messages or emails.
- The iPhone is the first smartphone with a single button on the front. This “Home” button allows you to return to the home page of the interface. There are no other buttons, offering all the space available on the 3.5-inch screen, a very large size at the time. This button will be duplicated with the iPhone 4s of a fingerprint reader.
- One multi-touch capacitive touchscreen able to detect multiple fingers at the same time. Thanks to this capacitive screen, the user can use two fingers to zoom in and out on a website; zoom, move and rotate a photo.
- The accelerometer, the sensor that allows you to switch from portrait (vertical) to landscape (horizontal) mode by simply turning your smartphone
- The light and proximity sensors arrive facade. The first allows you to decrease or increase the brightness of the screen depending on the environment. The second allows you to deactivate the screen during a phone call. The original iPhone is the first to take advantage of these two technologies.
- The iPhone is the first smartphone witha real internet browser and not a Wap browser. This is a light version of Safari capable of displaying entire web pages, just like on a computer. It also manages tabs and bookmarks.
- The iPhone is the first smartphone with the standardized push mail, unlike BlackBerry which requires a proprietary platform. Previously, users must manually retrieve received emails. Now the mails are pushed to the user as soon as they arrive. The iPhone is also the first compatible with “rich” mails, showing HTML links and some attachments, like photos.
- The visual voicemail happens with the iPhone. Thanks to this, it is no longer useful to listen to all the messages to arrive at the last one. Just touch the one that interests you.
- The iPhone is the first smartphone with Google maps and Google search preinstalled. Thanks to the iPhone, users benefit from the uses of a real geolocation service and can search Google directly from the phone interface.
- IPhone is the first phone to feature a complete multimedia player, with music, movies and series. Everything obviously works with iTunes.
Read also – Foldable iPhone: Apple could abandon the project despite several prototypes
This iPhone has also served as an example for other companies. It is thanks to the birth of iOS and this iPhone that competition was created. The best example is its direct competitor: Google Android. It doesn’t matter if we love iOS or not, we have to wish him a happy birthday, because he is the origin of what you hold in your hands (and what you read us with today)!