iPhone (Original) Review

Nothing on the shelf in June 2007 looked like it. A 3.5-inch capacitive glass screen at 320 by 480, a Samsung ARM11 clocked to 412 MHz, 128 MB of RAM and a layer of software that treated your finger as the pointer: pinch to zoom, inertial scrolling, a Safari that rendered the real web, visual voicemail and Google Maps, on a phone that cost $499 for 4GB with a two-year AT&T contract.

Read cold, the spec sheet was a mess. EDGE only and no 3G, a 2-megapixel camera with no autofocus, no flash and no video, no copy and paste, no MMS, and no third-party apps until iPhone OS 2.0 brought the App Store in July 2008. Apple cut the 8GB model from $599 to $399 after ten weeks and gave early buyers a $100 store credit, which is how badly it had misjudged demand. None of it mattered.

The Nokia N95 beat it on every line of the sheet, with 3G, GPS and a 5-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, and lost the decade. The aluminium back and glass front aged well, the 1400 mAh cell got through a day if you kept Wi-Fi in check, and the software ran through iPhone OS 3.1.3 in early 2010, three years of updates when the norm was none, before the A4 generation left it behind. The camera is a C in its own year because the N95 and the Sony Ericsson K800 shot better pictures at the same time. The innovation grade is the reason the S exists at all.