The popular Apple smartphone, the iPhone, will be, in just a few months, 5 years old.
It’s date of birth is January 9, 2007, when Steve Jobs announced the revolution that was going to change the perspective of mobile phones users and to seriously rattle the mobile industry.
Steve Jobs said that the competition will need five years to catch up with Apple. Well, five years have almost passed.
The iPhone will be presented in it’s fifth generation today, with the release of the iPhone 5. And the industry is still following the trend set by Apple almost five years ago.
The First iPhone – The Touch Revolution
In January 2007 Apple changed the mobile industry by presenting the first iPhone smartphone.
It had a 3,5 inch touchscreen and a single frontal button instead of the classic keyboard of a conventional phone. The first iPhone also had 2,5 G abilities ( GSM, EDGE ), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 2 MP photo camera, gravitational sensor and 4,8 or 16 GB internal memory.
On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone arrived in stores in the AT&T portfolio in the United States. Fans formed huge lines to get their hands on the iPhone. But what made the iPhone be truly special ?
We are talking about the permanent change in how a user interacts with a mobile phone. The touchscreen proposed by Apple was working much more easier than anything else on the mobile market at that time.
The first iPhone was a revolutionary product because of it’s 3,5 inch touchscreen, the quality it provided, doubled by an excellent design and quality construction. Let’s not forget about the possibility of installing thousands of applications.
iPhone 3G
One year later, in July 2008, the second iPhone generation was released on the market, the iPhone 3G, with third generation telephony abilities but also with a partially changed design.
- the back end of the iPhone was no longer built using aluminum, it was built using plastic
- the phone was a bit thinner.
Other substantial improvements were battery autonomy and the possibility of using multiple types of headsets.
Released in 2009, the iPhone 3G S was a upgrade of the 3G generation – faster and with battery autonomy improvements. The “S” came from the word “speed”.
Furthermore, it was the model that first introduced the voice control, a bigger capacity photo camera and support for HSDPA 7,2 Mbps speeds.
iPhone 4 – design change
Apple preferred to use a unitary design idea and not to change their successful products too much. In the case of the iPhone 4 we can talk about a bigger design change.
The phone has a flat back, it’s thinner but inside it houses a stronger processor, a special high resolution display and a better battery autonomy.
IPhone 5 or iPhone 4 S?
Today Apple will try, this time without the help of Steve Jobs, to reconquer the mobile phones market with it’s next product: the iPhone 5 or with a iPhone 4 upgrade ( possibly iPhone 4 S ).
It remains to be seen what is Tim Cook going to present tonight and if the Apple marketing machine will continue the five years old Apple tradition.
