iPhone News Updated

RIM thought original iPhone impossible

RIM thought original iPhone impossible

Cast your memory back to 2007, when most ‘smartphones’ still had what Steve Jobs referred to as that ugly ‘lower 40 percent’ – the place where all the buttons go. And shortly thereafter he revealed a completely touchscreen handset – the original iPhone.

While millions of tech lovers worldwide were gob smacked in disbelief at how the tech work, RIM, the makers of the BlackBerry, did not believe the tech actually worked, so claims a former employee of the company.

10^th January was all-hands on deck day

According to Electronista, a former employee said that RIM had a full-on internal panic in the wake of the iPhone’s unveiling, as well as multiple all-hands-on-deck meetings on 10 January 2007, a day after the iPhone was unveiled.

Why the disbelief?

Why was RIM in such disbelief about the iPhone’s capability, going so far as accusing Apple of actually lying about the smartphone’s usage? The giant display and what it meant for the battery. According to a former RIM employee and a commenter on a Shacknews post, supposedly the Apple smartphone ‘couldn’t do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life,’.

Truth be told, nothing about this logic by RIM was absurd. That screen was huge and intuitively would guzzle a lot of battery power to get any moderate use out of it. The commenter would later say: ‘Imagine their surprise when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it.’ Here’s iFixit’s teardown of the first generation handset to confirm this very finding.

Microsoft taken aback, too

Apparently it wasn’t only RIM whose engineers couldn’t figure out how Apple could actually achieve this, but Microsoft’s engineers, too, as well as employees at other handset manufacturers. The question one should then ask is why they thought it was impossible, when clearly Apple had actually pulled it off. Given that in terms of raw ability, RIM and Microsoft engineers are likely as knowledgable and as talented as Apple’s, it can’t be put down to personnel.

The commenter suggests that it was the mindset behind the BlackBerry that led RIM down the the route it could not see outside of – that smartphones were supposed to be extensions of pagers. Apple flipped the script, and what we expect of smartphones has changed fundamentally since.

Regardless of the truth value to this story [Ed: it sounds believable], there is certainly a case study of the innovator’s dilemma at play here, with the Apple smartphone doing what those who came before it hadn’t fully perfected yet.

Now we expect smartphones with gorgeous displays to be touchscreen, but one forgets that January 2007 was a mere four years ago.

[Thanks: http://www.mobile-computing-news.co.uk]

Comments are closed.