If there’s any piece of technology that has made a significant impact on the lives of everyone, it’s the cellular phone — specifically, the smartphone. It’s literally a tiny computer that fits into your pocket, and brings a plethora of information, entertainment, and lets you capture visual memories or be productive wherever you go. Pretty much everyone has a smartphone these days, for better or for worse.
The iPhone was the first smartphone of its kind. It got rid of the clunky physical keyboards that were on phones and smartphones prior to its release, instead replacing it with a touch screen keyboard that was a joy to use and much more responsive than any touch screen that came before it. Plus, we didn’t even need a stylus! And the multitouch support meant we could interact with the touch screen in intuitive new ways that we didn’t think were possible at the time.
With the G1, the phone began as soon as Google announced the Open Handset Alliance and the Android platform in November 2007. In less than a year, in a partnership with T-Mobile and HTC , the G1 came to fruition. However, the G1 was not the first Android phone design — originally, the first Android smartphone was going to be a BlackBerry-like device, but after Apple revealed the iPhone, those plans were scrapped in favor of the G1 design.
Palm’s webOS is the main factor behind the Pre’s influence on the smartphone industry — it was one of the first devices, besides the iPhone, to launch with a multitouch interface. With webOS, the interface was heavily gesture-based, which both iOS and Android drew inspiration from. For example, one of the key features of webOS was how one would close applications by using a finger to flick them off of the screen, closing the application from running in the background.
But that wasn’t all the iPhone 4 brought to the table. This was the first iPhone with a high-resolution Retina display with 326 pixels per inch , which is double that of the original iPhone. You could no longer see individual pixels on the screen, and that was a huge deal at the time. This set the stage for every iPhone that came after it and also upped the ante for the competition.
Because the BlackBerry Bold 9900 was in the time of the iPhone and Android phones, BlackBerry focused more on performance with the Bold 9900. This came in the form of the Liquid Graphics touch screen with BlackBerry 7 OS, which delivered “fast and smooth performance with highly responsive touch-based navigation, web browsing, pictures, video, and graphic intensive games,” according to BlackBerry.