Rui Carmo
If you wanna feel old in the mobile industry, this is a great yardstick since there is at least as much history behind the iPhone announcement as there is after it, and in some ways it’s quite surprising to realize that the pace of innovation has actually slowed comparatively to the bubbling cauldron of the early 2000s.
I remember getting e-mails and watching a video of the event while I was at Vodafone and realizing that everything we had on the portfolio was essentially dead in comparison – and the ensuing weeks (and months) of shock and denial inside the industry were an amazing thing to witness (and, again, something I should probably write about some time).
Also, it bears reminding that there was a lot of pre-announcement history and rumors. Sadly, I lost most of the links from my iPhone timeline pages over the years, and some day I’ll dig through older backups and try to restore them, but the from announcement to launch page has a lot of interesting things…