I wasn’t just wrong, I was being an idiot. “When Google was in the thick of Android’s development in 2006 and 2007 – long before the platform ever reached retail – it was a very different product, almost unrecognizable compared to the products we used today. Documents dated May of 2007 and made public during the course of Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over its use of Java in Android show off a number of those preliminary user interface elements, prominently marked ‘subject to change’, and you can see how this used to be a product focused on portrait QWERTY devices.” I’m hoping I can dive into this a little deeper tomorrow; since it’s the busiest period of the year for my little company right now, I don’t have the time to do it today. Just to make sure nobody thinks I’m just going to ignore this, I figured it’d be a good idea to post a quickie today. I’ll get back to this tomorrow, or Friday at the latest.
Wow, that OS looks like something I can actually use vs. a toy that somewhat renders web pages well. Nice keyboard, useful apps, easy to navigate. You wouldn’t have the variety of app types you do on touch screen with large screen. But, I don’t want variety I want something that works well with useful apps built in for message, calendar, email, and rss/atom is the only web I care about when on the road. I never had a blackberry, but I loved my wife’s Nokia E71 and my N85. I can message so much faster using T9 with predictive text on a 9 key than I ever could on a touch screen.
I agree, I prefer a keyboard-friendly interface – those ARE the Droids I was looking for.
Why don’t you buy Nokia E6-00, it’s basically key + touch Symbian belle device with gorgeous 360ppi screen.
Looks ways better that these screens while being true to keyboard first design.
Looking back, I think the Nokia N950 would have been a good choice for me.
But it is a product that was never sold, it was only for developers. I believe developers even were asked to sent them back.
No, Nokia never asked for that. It was essentially a gift from Meego supporters from within Nokia to Meego community (officially a loan). They basically pushed that program out. Otherwise Nokia could just bury those N950 somewhere in their dusty warehouses.
Ah, that is what it was: ‘officially a loan’.
Thanks for the info.
Well, those plus GPS, and Google Voice.
It’s why Steve Jobs hated Android so much, to him it was an obvious rip off especially as Eric sat on the board, pretty much a knife in the back.
Is that why he waited almost 2 years to start anything? And didn’t even target Google for patent infringement? Or Eric for industrial espionage?
Don’t be silly. iPhone came early, not even first, on the market which used the technology available at the time at it’s full potentional. Even if the iPhone did not arrive on the market an other would have build it.
The LG Prada proves it.
LG prada proves nothing.. it was a horribly slow device with badly implemented software. The soft keyboard was numeric with T9 input for crying out loud.
http://gizmodo.com/261172/settling-this-iphone-vs-lg-prada-nonsense
I’m not saying the first iPhone wasn’t a great device and software combination for it’s time.
I’m saying, it is obvious that the market would go that direction.
Because the technology existed.
In hindsight may be, but as evidenced by this very article most companies were not going in that direction and hadn’t in decades. Given that most of the technology to make an iPhone existed in some form or the other, no one else had done it.
Look at the stalwarts of the industry around 2007, Palm, RIM, Nokia, Windows Phone.. they are all but dead now. Primarily because none of them saw it coming. They all reacted and a little too late. So your contention that someone else would have done it is with out any real historical evidence.
iPhone comes out and then Google reacts about 1.5 years later by redesigning android to be similar. Palm comes out with webOS nearly 2 years after, Microsoft with Windows 7 3 years after and Nokia tries a few things to compete and failed. RIM with the blackberry storm with a horrible touchscreen in 2008.
If these companies would have done it anyway those products would have come out within a month or in far lesser time than after the iPhone was launched. None of them had the same quality of touchscreen that Apple had. Because Apple had designed it in-house and had it manufactured, the rest of the industry caught up after.
Same deal with the iPad retina display. Eventually devices will catch up but the IP to make it happen won’t permeate the general market for many months. Tablets with those HiDPI screens will eventually flood the market but not until the end of the year.
Edited 2012-04-26 14:49 UTC
I have a Prada, and decided to use it for several months last year.
What’s amazing about the Prada is not that it was better or worse than the iPhone (it was worse), but that it was the first large-scale phone designed with a finger-only interface – and I loved the keyboard (which, contrary to your statement, does have a letter keyboard). It wasn’t as good as Apple’s, surely, but it was still the first finger-driven interface.
That alone earns the Prada a place in history. The touch era started not with the iPhone, but with the Prada – which was a massively successful phone.
Edited 2012-04-26 09:02 UTC
The thing that made the iPhone innovative was not a touch screen but the multi-touch nature of the screen and the innovative software that was built around it.
There were many full touchscreen devices launched prior to the LG prada even. Garmin nuvi series GPS devices for instance. Most PDA’s were touch screens even before the Prada. But using an iPhone touchscreen versus a nuvi touch screen was not even in the same league as far as user experience goes.
For example, the first car to have the same control layout as todays cars was the Cadillac type 53 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Type_53 which was released in 1915 a good 30 years after the Benz in 1885.
Cars leading up to the Caddy had the similar concepts of gears, steering etc. but they were all different and unintuitive. Now most modern cars are driven like that Caddy because it brought it all together and made cars intuitive for the masses. Your “LG prada did it first” argument is like saying some arbitrary car before the Type 53 had gears and a steering, so the type 53 is not the tipping point it is claimed to be. The reality of the matter is most smart phones today work like the iPhone and not the Prada.
You don’t flick to scroll on the Prada, nor you do you double tap to zoom portions of a webpage, or pinch to zoom on it. Other than it being a touch screen device it is rather uninteresting historically.
Edited 2012-04-26 14:57 UTC
No it didn’t, because no one copied the Prada. It was an evolutionary dead end. It had no descendants. Real evolution is full of examples like this. Full of examples of ecosystems pregnant with the possibility of a major new mutation, one that could lead to endless derivative forking mutations and ones that will thus change the ecosystem. But there are also plenty of examples of botched mutations, mutations that take the pregnant possibilities and express them a way that is an evolutionary dead end, in a way that leads no where.
The Prada was an evolutionary dead end because nobody copied it. Nobody. Nobody was inspired by it to redesign their phones. Nobody. Nobody changed their products or their product development because of the Prada. Nobody. The Prada was made first announced on December 12, 2006. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs little more than a month later on January 9, 2007. Thus the two phones were made known to the world at almost the same time.
Since then countless phones have been released that work just like an iPhone. They work like that because of the success of the iPhone not because of the failure of the Prada.
The Prads sold millions and millions of times and won countless awards – that’s a failure for you? Strange metrics you have.
In a any case, you’re so far into the RDF you can’t even acknowledge a simple truth: the Prada was the first phone with a full touch interface – not the iPhone. It’s absolutely fascinating and massively entertaining to see you squirming like this.
Actually the first touch phone was made by a guy called John in his garden shed in a small town outside London in July 2006.
Imagine if that was true – would it make John’s touch phone important? Could the revolution that happened after 2007 in phone and phone OS design be traced back to John’s phone?
I repeat. Nobody copied the Prada or were influenced or were inspired by the Prada to change their product design. Nobody. And there is not a shred of evidence to support the proposition that the Prada was a game changing product. What changed things, disrupted the phone market and led to a widespread mutation in phone design was the iPhone.
So what is the significance of the Prada? Its a slightly interesting footnote in the history of phone design, a product that indicated roughly the direction that phone design was going to take but a product that was deeply flawed, failed to show the true potential of the new touch screen paradigm and ended up going nowhere. That was not the fate of the iPhone announced four weeks after the Prada.
If one wants to understand where the world of today came from then one needs to trace the real roots of things, not the history of things that might have changed the world but the history of the things that actually did. All else is just pedantry.
I already made clear that, as a consumer, I couldn’t care less about who copies who, and I have no problem saying that there’s a lot to like about the iPhone but… Disrupted? Widespread mutation?!?
Please, tell me you’re shooting for a job with Apple’s PR department rather than being just pathetic!
RT.
Well, he outright said once “I write to defend Apple” (a quick google search: site:osnews.com “I write to defend Apple” returns it http://www.osnews.com/thread?507146 ), and that he’s been enamored by them for the last 3 decades or so (so presumably also in a decade when they had clearly sub-par and overpriced offerings; either way, a bit crazy, for so long just about some company, or about anything)
And so, I guess (and as Thom Holwerda points out in the sub-thread returned by the above google search), to him Apple PR gives out facts. Or (Bill Shooter of Bul) he sees challenging such company whorship as a result of hate towards his darling and/or whorship of another one.
If the events are more complex, then that’s just bad for them, I suppose. Like (vs. most of what he claims above) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada#iPhone_controversy
But then, he also shoots himself in the foot from time to time (like with “So what is the significance of the Prada? […] a product that indicated roughly the direction that phone design was going to take” above, or how he praises the supposed innovation brought by Apple vs. what I point out at the end of the other result of the mentioned google search http://www.osnews.com/permalink?511154 )
what do you think of the sagem wa3050 from 2001?
http://www.gsmarena.com/sagem_wa_3050-pictures-246.php
the important stuff even has finger-sized icons
and i know there was one from siemens in the 90s but i’ve forgotten what it was called…
Edited 2012-04-26 20:14 UTC
That is a laughably bad analogy, even by the standards of analogies – and it just goes to show that you have no clue how biological evolution actually works. Would you claim that dolphins are evolved from sharks because they share similar body shapes & similar adaptations to their environment?
The similarities are only superficial and there are fundamental differences between those two organisms, both morphologically AND genetically. There’s a term for that: “convergent evolution”, which basically means two or more organisms that develop similar traits, despite neither being descended from the other. Which is a much more accurate analogy for the relationship between Androids and iProducts.
If anything, your analogy is closer to intelligent design, if not out-and-out creationism. Maybe you should back and re-read some of those 10th grade biology texts, instead of basing your understanding of evolution on Pokemon.
Repeating things (in general, not just this) like they’re some mantras won’t make non-RDF-ed people believe… (though, sure, it can strengthen your faith, shield you stronger in the perception bubble of your very atypical place; and http://www.osnews.com/permalink?516201 )
Curious BTW how that “announced on December 12, 2006” Prada won the iF Design Award in September 2006.
Quoting the clowns at Gizmodo, eh? Like they have any credibility with anyone who can put 2 and 2 together…
RT.
I was too lazy to google more. Read my later responses to the thread. For people that want to be adamant that the LG Prada was like the iPhone, no source is credible enough.
There is a video of the head of Prada at the time saying the LG Prada and the iPhone were different devices and not competing in the same market. But the anti-apple hive doesn’t want to give credit where credit is due because Apple came up with an innovative concept that changed the entire industry.
The argument is similar to saying Bah! Google was not the first search engine! nothing innovative about Google at all. AltaVista and Excite etc had a text field where you typed stuff and results came out. So google didn’t do anything innovative with search. Sure they made search better but the market was headed there anyway!
Edited 2012-04-26 15:05 UTC
That’s Apple’s SOP: they look at the research other people are doing, and try to jump the queue. To Apple (and their fanboys), being “first” is the only thing that matters, and they’re more than willing to cut corners & make huge compromises so they can put out the “new shiny thing”.
Of course, Apple’s problem is that that approach results in products that seem impressive/cutting edge only in the short-to-medium term (and only to clueless tech-tards). Longer-term, their products are inevitably hobbled by the shortcuts Apple took in order to be “first”. This lets their competitors sit back, wait for the technology to mature, and then easily overtake Apple from a standing start.
Just look at the way that iOS has been frantically playing catch-up even to Android, despite Apple having almost a 2 year lead. And compared to truly-innovative mobile OSes like WP7 or PlaybookOS, iOS looks almost as crusty and outdated as “Classic” MacOS looked when compared to NT4.
Examples, please? What corners were cut and where?
Again examples, please. We can get into the technical aspects of them once you provide them. This is how innovation works.
After Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile barrier, many have come after, even high school athletes that have repeated the feat.
Climbing half dome in Yosemite when it was first done took 5 days. Alex Honnold did it recently, free solo, in under 3 hours.
How about netscape and mosaic? Where are they today in the world of web browsers?
History is rife with such examples. The pioneers usually are left behind if they can’t cope.
Edited 2012-04-26 15:52 UTC
Multitasking. Battery life. SDK. Applications. Cut/paste. All of these were established features of the PDA and smartphone world for almost a decade before the iPhone came out. Lots of corners were cut for the iPhone.
First, if Eric had done anything unethical the SEC would have crawled up his back side. Now maybe Jobs had a right to be pissed, but that doesn’t mean crap.
Second, All device looked like that before touch screens hit the market. You have no proof that touch screens didn’t cause the shift in interface. Its like calling a Porsche a rip off of Ferrari because they both incorporate similar technologies.
Nokia had a tablet vision once upon a time, too. And it was called Maemo.
http://beans.seartipy.com/category/n800/
These early Android screen grabs remind me of Maemo’s early vision (pre-N900). Mind you, Maemo wasn’t originally a cell phone platform.
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not.
he’s clearly trolling
Edited 2012-04-26 00:25 UTC
I think Thom is overplaying this issue a bit since he was rather adamant about Android 1.0 not being deeply inspired by the iPhone. For most of the world I don’t think this is a very disturbing revelation.
Apple is not really completely wrong in their accusations about being ripped off either imho (the iPhone really was a great leap forward), but I see no reason why they should get legal protection. Free markets and all that.
Everybody copies everybody. Apple is just more entitled and grandiose about it’s “inventions”.
And we, as consumers, would only benefit from that rather than, say, being tied to any specific platform/vendor — the more options, the better!
RT.
definitely
I think Apple might be on a better track now since Cook has taken the helm. News items discussed that he is more inclined to settle patent disputes than Steve Jobs who was intent on destroying the competition.
This guy is not long at the helm and i like him more.
I personally have nothing against Apple except their anti competitive practices and their smugness concerning them always being “first” and trailblazers.
Edited 2012-04-26 13:49 UTC
Do you really think those screen shots look so different to the Android of today? All I see is an interface suitable for a low resolution 2″ square screen. Obviously if they were targetting at a small screen above a qwerty keyboard, things would look a little different, but the big difference between those screenshots and the current Android is a bit of whitespace to spread the blocks of text out. The only other difference is that today we have icons on the home screen of our phones. <sarcasm>Clearly apple invented icons, we all know that </sarcasm>
EDIT: Actually, if these screenshots prove anything, it’s that Apple stole the “skeumorphism” you love so much, Thom. Look at that calculator! And expressing the time as the rotation of the planet!
Edited 2012-04-26 07:51 UTC
Sorry to nitpick Thom, but those devices UIs were landscape not portrait (which is the primary alignment for Android usage today)
I’ve saved you the trouble and written the angry rant
http://blog.quaddmg.com/2012/04/26/android-2007
Different my arse. Android is roughly the same as it ever was. Maybe from a design perspective it’s a little different, but you know what, I’m coming to a conclusion on all this:
Fuck design.
I don’t really care who came first Apple or Google, Mozilla or Opera etc. Just innovate and let the customer decide who is best. Screw patents.
I don’t know about important, but, hey, credit where credit is due. Apple really did do a great thing with the iPhone. I am tempted to view Apples timeline as the Apple II -> the original Macintosh -> iPhone. Those are the big three they brought around. Legal posturing aside there are some engineers in there that deserve a lot of credit.
I hope you mean credit in the form of props and not monetary