The First iPhone Goes on Sale
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The first iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007. It combined a capacitive multi-touch screen, a mobile version of OS X, a real web browser, phone functions, and an iPod-style media player in one device.
The screen was the most visible break with earlier smartphones. Instead of a hardware keyboard and stylus, the interface used finger gestures such as tapping, swiping, and pinching. Safari rendered desktop-style web pages using the WebKit engine, which made the phone feel closer to a small computer than to the WAP-oriented mobile web common at the time.
The original model had major limitations: no 3G, no App Store, and no official third-party native applications at launch. Yet its software architecture and touch interface changed expectations for mobile computing. The App Store arrived the following year and turned that hardware into a general software platform.