(This was going to be a post about why multitouch keyboards are superior to tactile keyboards, but “why was the iPhone my first smartphone?” popped into my head, so I wrote this instead.)
Many people who love the iPhone never owned a SideKick, BlackBerry, or other “smartphone” before their iPhone. For example, I had a RAZR. Many of my friends also had RAZRs because RAZRs looked nice enough and fit easily in our pockets. However, none of us loved our phones, we were just getting by because…
…We all owned iPods. Long before I became a Mac user, I had an iPod. I remember as early as 2002 my friends and I saying, “wouldn’t it be sweet if Apple made a phone?” We were holding out for Apple to save us.
Now, to this day, my friends and acquaintances who did own Blackberries or SideKicks back then are less likely to own an iPhone today.
Most of them explain this by saying “I need a tactile keyboard” which is valid. Muscle memory, familiarity, and platform migration costs are important.
However, I believe that the most important reason they resist the iPhone is what Seth Godin talks about in his post Gravity is Just a Theory: preexisting beliefs.
iPhone fans’ preexisting beliefs were: “My phone is meh, whatever.” and “Man I love my iPod.”
BlackBerry fans’ preexisting beliefs were: “I am a serious person with serious business email needs and my BlackBerry is my katana.” and “Look how productive I am, I can be on top of my email even as I’m having lunch with you.”
Now that there’s a new plausible smartphone player in Google, it seems the dominant beliefs are:
- “OMG, iPhone is the best ever, why would anyone use anything different?”
- “I need my tactile BlackBerry keyboard for work email.”
- “My BlackBerry sucks, I mean just look at the browser, but I need a tactile keyboard so I’m going to try a Droid.”
- “Gah, I can’t stand those fanatical iPhone users, I’m getting a Nexus One.”
So, what’s the lesson here?
The cellphone market only looked mature before the iPhone. The cellphone market had been around a long time, it was fairly consolidated, it was in fact boring by 2007, but there was a huge untapped reserve of people who were being served yet weren’t satisfied.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about market, political, environmental, and social equilibrium conditions that, in my opinion, “kind of suck”. I find the iPhone story hopeful because it means that sometimes a crummy equilibrium only looks unbreakable, and that change for the better is possible.
In case you forgot what things were like before the iPhone, check out my friend Kontra’s post: Before Apple introduced the iPhone.