8 reviews of the first iPhone 10 years ago

Before Apple, phone was just a phone. It looked like a small device with plastic keyboard at the bottom. A phone without a button was a distant dream. On 9th January 2007, exactly ten years back, Apple launched its first phone, iPhone.  It received a bag of mixed response – few praised it to be revolutionary and few just got it all wrong. But we know one thing for sure that iPhone just laid out the blueprint of the smartphone generation. It forced everyone, including Android, re-imagine what your phone could actually do and look. You can’t miss the hilarious negative reviews of the first iPhone.

On 10th Birthday of iPhone, let’s look back at what Steve Jobs said about iphone at its launch.

“Well, today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class.

The first one: is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.

The second: is a revolutionary mobile phone.

And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.

So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough Internet communications device.

An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone … Are you getting it?

These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.”

“What we wanna do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use.

This is what iPhone is. OK?

So, we’re gonna reinvent the phone.”

“Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus.
We’re gonna use the best pointing device in the world. We’re gonna use a pointing device that we’re all born with – we’re born with ten of them. We’re gonna use our fingers.
We’re gonna touch this with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal.”

“So, so we have been very lucky to have brought a few revolutionary user interfaces to the market in our time.
First was the mouse.
The second was the click wheel.
And now, we’re gonna bring multi-touch to the market.”

Read the full excerpt of the speech here

Here are some of the first positive reviews on iPhone First Generation:

As it turns out, much of the hype and some of the criticisms are justified. The iPhone is revolutionary; it’s flawed. It’s substance; it’s style. It does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones.- New York Times

E-mail and web-browsing are unbelievably great. Ditto the crisp music and video playback. Everybody I called with the iPhone remarked on the crispness and clarity of the audio. For the iPhone, Apple has brought to market a revolutionarily smart, sensitive touchscreen and created an entirely new user interface to match it, all in one go, so seamlessly that my 3-year-old daughter — and I apologize for going to this place, but the fact is striking nonetheless — had no trouble unlocking the iPhone and dialing with it (even though she believed that she was playing a musical instrument).- TIME

The most remarkable thing about iPhone is what’s missing: a physical dialing keypad and/or full qwerty, or traditional, keyboard. Instead, either a virtual keypad or keyboard shows up on the iPhone screen, depending on what you are doing — entering a Web address, for instance, or banging out a text message. – USA Today

Here are few Negative response which we can’t avoid:

“Five hundred dollars, fully subsidized, with a plan?! I said, ‘That is the most expensive phone in the world! And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard!’” — Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO

“The big competitors in the mobile-phone industry such as Nokia Oyj and Motorola Inc. won’t be whispering nervously into their clamshells over a new threat to their business….iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks.” — Matthew Lynn, Bloomberg

If it’s smart [Apple] will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures… Otherwise I’d advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you’ll see.” —John C. Dvorak, tech columnist

Is there a toaster that also knows how to brew coffee? There is no such combined device, because it would not make anything better than an individual toaster or coffee machine. It works the same way with the iPod, the digital camera or mobile phone: it is important to have specialized devices.” —Jon Rubinstein, former iPod engineer

There’s no memory-card slot, no chat program, no voice dialing. You can’t install new programs from anyone but Apple…The browser can’t handle Java or Flash, which deprives you of millions of Web videos.” —David Pogue, The New York Times

A decade later, iPhone has completely changed, it is bigger, better and takes great pictures but it is fundamentally the same. Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry lost its relevance in the market and we don’t know the future yet. But Steve Jobs was so convinced with iPhone that he said, “iPhone is like having your life in your pocket.”