TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Watts Martin:

Look. Apple got market share by doing stuff that nobody else in the phone market was doing. There were a lot of similar (but not identical) things that other companies did in bits and pieces, but there simply wasn’t anything else like the iPhone before the iPhone. Ironically, the most revolutionary thing the iPhone brought to the market had nothing to do with what these battles are over: it was the web browser. We already forget just how much it blew the doors off anything available in a device that size in 2007. The biggest sign that Apple got that right is how dominant WebKit-based browsers are on mobile devices now.

The iPhone’s touchscreen-only design is only obvious now because Apple executed so well on the concept. At the time, it certainly wasn’t obvious that was the direction mobile devices were going; the sheer amount of criticism leveled at the iPhone then is all you need to look at to see that’s true.