The Apple Beat: The iPhone, five years later

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

It has been five years since Steve Jobs launched the Apple iPhone and changed the world of mobile phones and the world of mobile computing as we know it.

The iPhone's story is how one single product remapped the entire mobile industry. How one device, created a need, developed a supporting ecosystem and triggered the most competitive of segments technology has ever seen.

Life before iPhone

The cellular phone landscape in 2006-2007 before Apple launched the iPhone

Looking back to pre iPhone 2007, my phone was a BlackBerry Curve and I was completely happy with it. It managed e-mail, schedules and messaging and when I really, really needed to surf the web, it could do so, albeit painfully.

The Curve had a 2 megapixel camera with an LED flash. Battery life lasted all day and if anything went wrong, all I had to do was pull the battery and let it reboot.

Life was good. 

Apps on phones were almost nonexistent, unless you were crazy enough to pay $35.00 for some of the applications offered on Palm devices,which at that time, were running on Windows Mobile.

Windows and RIM had the smartphone market pretty much divvied up as Palm was busy being bought and sold and it's OS was no good for mobile Internet and Symbian was more geared towards a phone experience rather than being a pocket computer.

Samsung was known for slider phones and LG was known for QWERTY messaging phones and fashion-focused devices like the LG Prada. Nokia's coolest device was the Nokia E70 which featured a folding keyboard that suspended the small screen in between. Sony was gung ho on its WalkMan line of phones and the most daring "smart-phone" was HTC's Tytn which had a slide out QWERTY keyboard and it also ran Windows Phone. 

Then this happened.

Looking back now, it is easier to understand Apple's indignation over its patents and designs being copied today. Look at the right side of Canadianreviewer.com where all the recent hardware review photo links are posted, the majority of the smartphones featured have no physical keyboards and do emulate the iPhone's basic designs and functionality.

Sure, a lot of the iPhone's features had at some point or another existed before the device was released and some of these features like touch-control, the ability to play music and video and surf the Internet as well as run applications may have been made it to other devices. But, until Apple came along, no one had managed to seamlessly put it all together in one device.

The most impressive thing about the iPhone is that it has remained the same product for five years.

Sure, the specs and capabilities have improved and the OS and ecosystem has exploded far beyond what anyone had imagined.

The iPhone is still  sporting a 3.5-inch screen (although newer models are Retinized), it still has that dock connector it inherited from the iPod and it is still one of the  easiest devices to use.

Five years forward and the iPhone 4S is still a stunning phone that's had a halo effect over other parts of the industry. I think a few aspects will need to change during the next revision.

The iPhone needs LTE data speeds and that is certainly coming (the latest iPad's got a 4G-LTE radio), users are clamouring for larger screen sizes, the world is getting ready for mobile payments on smartphones and quad-core processors as well as 2GB of onboard RAM are fast becoming the norm for flagship smartphones.

I think these will all be addressed in the new iPhone revision coming later this year. But the best part about any iPhone and iOS revision is that many of the features of the new device are likely to trickle down to older models. So that three-year old iPhone 3GS will still benefit from the new OS without you spending a cent. 

It will be interesting to see what's next for Apple's iPhone and if the upcoming version will be a revolutionary upgrade that will once again disrupt the mobile landscape.