The Phone Is Becoming a Computer

Two days ago, Apple began selling the iPhone in the United States. I have been reading everything written about it and trying to understand whether this is a genuinely different kind of device or only a well-designed version of things that already existed.

I think it might be genuinely different, and I want to explain why.

What phones looked like before this

Nokia held roughly 40% of the global mobile phone market in 2007 and its Symbian platform was the dominant smartphone operating system. Symbian ran on millions of devices and supported third-party applications, but the experience of browsing the web on them was deeply limited — WAP pages were stripped-down versions of websites that looked nothing like the real thing. Windows Mobile 6.0, which shipped on devices from HTC, Samsung, and Motorola, resembled a shrunken Windows desktop with stylus-driven menus designed for a different screen size. BlackBerry was excellent at corporate email and had real keyboards, but web browsing was slow and painful.

The input problem shaped everything. Small physical keyboards required multi-tap or predictive text that most people tolerated rather than enjoyed. Touchscreens existed — Palm had used them since the 1990s — but they required a stylus and produced interfaces designed around tapping rather than touching.

What Apple announced in January and shipped in June

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld Expo. He described it as “three products in one”: a widescreen iPod, a mobile phone, and an internet communicator. The third part is the one I find most significant.

The device that went on sale June 29 runs Apple’s modified version of OS X on a Samsung-manufactured ARM11 processor at 412 MHz with 128 MB of RAM. The screen is a 3.5-inch multi-touch display at 320 × 480 pixels. Two price points: $499 for 4 GB and $599 for 8 GB, both requiring a two-year AT&T contract in the United States. The camera is 2 megapixels, fixed focus. There is no 3G network support — it uses AT&T’s EDGE network, which means web browsing over cellular is slow, often 100–200 Kbps.

The iPhone ships with a full version of Safari. Not a mobile-adapted browser — the actual browser, able to render regular web pages. The screen is large enough and the pinch-to-zoom is smooth enough that this actually works. Multi-touch allows two-finger gestures that no stylus-based interface can replicate.

Why this might matter beyond the device itself

The practical consequence is that carrying an iPhone means carrying something that can access the real internet, not a mobile-adapted version of it. That changes what “having internet access” means.

Until now, checking information online away from a desk required either a laptop or accepting a degraded mobile version of the web. If the iPhone works as described, the full web starts to become something that fits in a pocket — even if the current EDGE connection is slow.

Apple has stated that third-party applications will not be allowed to run natively; developers are expected to build web applications. I think this is temporary — the pressure to allow native apps will grow as the platform becomes popular — but it limits what the phone can do in its current form.

What I am uncertain about

The competitors are not standing still. Nokia is working on a new platform. Google has been assembling what will become Android. Microsoft will not ignore a successful new smartphone category. The interesting question is not whether Apple wins this specific product announcement, but whether the category of “phone that is also a real computer” becomes the dominant form — and how quickly.

I think it will. A phone is already the device that is always with us. If it can also do what a computer does, the question of when to carry a separate computer starts to look different. The phone is becoming a computer — and two days ago, one version of that future went on sale.