iPhone evolution

 

The iPhone did not just appear fully formed from thin air. Quite apart from the development work that went into its creation, it comes at the end of a long line of related consumer products from both Apple and other hardware manufacturers.

The most obvious relative is the iPod, which first appeared as a chunky hard drive-based music player in 2001 (below). Contrary to popular belief, it was not an immediate success. Initially only available for the Mac, its bulk and weight were not fully compensated by the underwhelming storage capacity, and it was bundled with iTunes 1, which was fairly primitive. It could not even say how many times that you had played a certain track. Nonetheless, things should be put into context. These were early days for MP3 players; the market was young, with competitor products boasting equally meagre specifications.

The iPod only really took off when it was spotted in the hands of celebrities in the gossip press. People suddenly started taking note of those distinctive white earphones and the iPod's fortunes — and those of its parent company - were changed forever.

There have now been six generations of full-sized iPod, incorporating first colour displays then video playback features. These have been accompanied by three generations of iPod nano, the latest of which now also play video, and two different iPod shuffle designs, the latest of which is barely any larger than a very fat postage stamp and comes in a range of colours. The full-sized iPod is now called the classic, and it has lost its spot at the top of the range to the iPod touch, which appeared shortly after the iPhone's first US appearance. The touch is much slimmer than the iPhone and is missing some of its features (above left).

That the iPod was an important predecessor of the iPhone is obvious from the importance of similar features in the iPhone itself, not to mention the fact that Steve Jobs calls it the best iPod Apple has ever made.

Likewise, the fact that it interfaces with your computer through iTunes is a mark of its heritage. iTunes, like the iPod, was initially a Mac-only product and the first four versions were little more than music ripping, organising and streaming applications. When Apple finally launched the iTunes Music Store, as it was then called (it has since dropped the Music part), it sold only a couple of hundred thousand tracks and no videos at all. Podcasts were as yet uninvented, and most of us continued to buy our music in the traditional way - on CD.

iTunes remains an important part of the iPhone system, largely because it runs on both the PC and Mac, and it is through this that you synchronise not only your music, but also all of your data, such as contacts, web browser bookmarks and photos.
 

However, the iPhone is more than just a mobile phone with music playing features. It is also a fully fledged mobile computer. It is not the first time Apple has gone down this road, as it once had a line of moderately successful portable devices called the Newton MessagePad. These were bulky by modern standards, but they were breakthrough products, among the first on the market to understand hand-written input and sporting enough ports and add-ons for them to work as standalone computers, rather than organisers that must regularly cheek in with a desktop partner.

They were championed by Jobs' predecessor, G:1 Amelio, but when Jobs returned to Apple after several years developing computers at NeXT, he canned the whole line, along with several other initiatives on which the company was working, including licensing the rights for other manufacturers to make Mac-compatible computers. Many saw this as a bad move, but Jobs' determined management turned around the struggling company as it launched one successful product after another, starting with the semi-transparent iMac and ending up today with the iPhone 3G.

However, when Apple bought NeXT, it didn't just buy Jobs; it also bought the company's assets, intellectual property and existing projects, many of which were kept in development. The most important of these was the NeXT operating system, NeXT Step, which eventually became Mac OS X, the operating system that runs the Mac.

Why is this important for the iPhone? Because a cut-down edition of the very same operating system is what holds it all together. Key features such as Cover Flow — the ability to flick back and forth through your album covers in the iPod application - also feature in Mac OS X Leopard.

While it may have been the most advanced pocketable computer of  its day, the Newton MessagePad was not the first personal digital assistant. If we discount the earliest calculators with built-in address books and calendars, a lot of the credit for popularising palm-top computing really has to go to UK-based company Psion.
 

 Psion's Series 5 popularised | the idea of computers that let you type on the move.

In 1984, it launched the first Psion Organiser. It had a single-line screen and followed this up two years later with the Organiser II. They were bulky devices with alphabetically arranged keyboards and text-based screens sporting one, two or four lines, depending on the model. They did not look much like an iPhone, but the two devices share many key features, including an address book and calendaring application. Psion followed these with the Series 3 and Series 5 machines, which sported full Qwerty keyboards and ran the Epoc operating system, which evolved into Symbian and is now used on many modern iPhone competitors.

However, Psion wasn't the only company investigating mobile computing. While it soldiered on with a button-based physical keyboard, US Robotics' Palm Computing launched the PalmPilot, a stylus-based organiser with much the same form factor as the iPhone. In many ways, these devices were similar to the Newton MessagePad line-up in that they employed a fairly sophisticated form of handwriting recognition called Graffiti. This sometimes required the user to use specific shapes rather than natural letters, such as squared-off 7 for a T, and an upside-down V for A, but it was quick and easy to learn.

Microsoft adopted a similar system for its early pen-driven Windows CE devices. These were designed to look like the regular computer-based versions of Windows available at the time and, as such, required fairly hefty hardware. Microsoft did not make any devices itself. Instead, it licensed the operating system to other hardware manufacturers, starting in November 1996. It has been through various updates since then and now, as Windows Mobile, drives many of the most challenging competitors to the iPhone.

As such, Apple's mobile phone gadget may be the most advanced phone/music player hybrid yet created, but it is certainly neither a first-to-market device nor anything other than a natural evolution of at least five product lines that came before it. However, in packaging it in such a desirable form, and ensuring the hardware and underlying software work perfectly together, Apple has delivered a device that it claims is five years ahead of any competitor. From the looks of the various so-called 'iPhone killers', none of which should cause it too much concern, that claim may not be entirely wide of the mark.  







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