Today we all have these massive phones with big and sharp displays packed in with all these crazy features but did u ever thought what did the originals looked like? Steve Jobs considered android as a stolen product and wanted to destroy android for copying the iPhone. So let’s see which one was better at that time and who copied who (will get to that later read till the end!).
Display:
Talking first about the display both these devices had a big or massive displays (Massive by 2008 standards) (let’s not forget about Nokia and Moto phones popular as smartphones at that time). The first version of iPhone was quite big with a 3.5 inch display. On the other hand Google G1 had a smaller display that was a 3.2 inch display but both of them had the same resolution of 320×480 which meant that Google G1’s display had more PPI. On the other hand Google G1 display had a TFT panel due to which it looked weird and had bad viewing angles while iPhone was using the HVGA which looks much nicer than what was found on G1.
Design and Hardware:
The iPhone and the G1 had a night and day difference in terms of hardware. The iPhone was twice as thin as its competitor. iPhone had only one input method whereas G1 couldn’t actually make up its mind what it wanted to be- it wanted to be fully touch screen phone or it wants to be navigated like a blackberry with scroll wheel or an actual keyboard to control only some things like typing when you get bored with other two of them. It did seem like an identity crisis because it really didn’t know what it really was but still people loved to have so many choices whereas apple on the other hand used only a touch display for everything and had no stylus like the one found on the Note series these days. On the iPhone there was a tiny or miniscule 2MP camera on the back with the bottom made up of plastic with the antenna bands. The back was non removable whereas G1 had a removable back and it could accept a SD card of 8 GB. The feature which today the iPhone7 doesn’t have was present on the earlier versions of iPhone ….. Yes I am talking about the headphone jack. The first iPhone had a built in headphone jack. Yay no adapters! But take that back actually you did need one because it was recessed so that one could use only apple-branded earphones. G1 did had a unique design which made it look like a J-shaped device and made it more comfortable in hand but it couldn’t stand the test of time like the iPhone.
Software:
Even though iPhone won the hardware race with its nice design by quite a margin but the winner of the software race is simply android because of its more advanced features. This thing was pretty crazy that on android you couldn’t set a lock screen wallpaper whereas on the iPhone you couldn’t set the background of the home screen(it had a plain black background). You could even set a pattern unlock on the android. One more thing which the iPhone didn’t had at that time was pages. If you tap on any app it would simply open the app whereas if you do so on android one could simply move and rearrange the apps as per your liking and create new pages. Multitasking which we take for granted these days didn’t even existed at that time on the iPhone which works very well on the newer versions. This where android steps up as there was a way to multitask in the G1 by pressing and holding the home button. One more thing which didn’t exist at that time were personal assistants-no Siri, no Google Assistant. Also the very first version of android didn’t have an app drawer where all the apps were organized. There was no notification center on the first ever iOS whereas android had a built in notification center. Adding widgets, changing wallpapers, adding app shortcuts-customization like these were only on android at that moment. One biggest thing iPhone didn’t had at that time was the app store. G1 did came with a play store which was known as ‘Market’ at that time.The first ever version of android didn’t have a virtual keyboard which did came in later versions of android. Even though virtual keyboard came later, it just didn’t feel good, nice and natural as the iPhone’s virtual keyboard felt.
Now the thing I was talking about in the starting. Rumors were that Google tried to copy apple’s iPhone design. The first design that came out before they saw the iPhone was similar to what Blackberry, Nokia etc. phones looked like- a small 1.0 inch display with a QWERTY keyboard at the bottom and all business feature like mail to call it a smartphone of that time. But when they saw the original iPhone they just came to know that their blackberry rip-off couldn’t compete with the iPhone so they had to go ahead and re imagine and bring a touch screen to it.
I hope you enjoyed this long journey into the past where we all learnt how the first version of smartphones which we use today looked like….
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