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Wired easily has the best article on the iPhone you’re ever going to read on this day or any other. It’s about the history and development of the device, from Steve Jobs sensing that his iPod business wasn’t as secure as his stockholders would like (wireless providers and their MP3-playing cellphones were a big concern) to the phone’s launch last June, which tripled the data traffic for AT&T in New York and San Francisco.
Some quick highlights:
• Work on the iPhone began in earnest around Thanksgiving, 2005, 14 months before its MacWorld 2007 debut
• The Apple/AT&T (then Cingular) discussions took more than a year to complete; AT&T gets a small percentage of iTunes revenue out of the deal
• Linux was considered as a possible OS for the iPhone but “Jobs refused to use someone else’s software”
If you have the time, I urge you to read the whole article. There’s lots of little “oh wow, really” facts in there for you to digest.
And by the way, Wired thinks the iPhone is a smartphone, too. (“At press time, analysts were speculating that customers would snap up about 3 million units by the end of 2007, making it the fastest-selling smartphone of all time.”) So there.
The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry [Wired]