Do you mean the Cisco iPhone from the 90s or the Brazilian iphone from the early '00s? I’m totally just taking the piss though, I know you mean the Apple one from the later '00s but it wasn’t that rare to have mobile internet before it, they were just riding the wave that was already breaking across society.
Apple had a major advantage though, lots of people were already eyeing their popular mp3 player, if a phone could be a phone, internet, and a good music player you can sync easily, it won for a lot of people. I couldn’t justify the price and really liked physical keyboards, by the time those became rare I disliked Apple too much to try them.
Somewhere I have my old BB 8320 from 2007, it was awesome because it had WiFi so much better speed when WiFi was available.
I’m with the op on this one, I had just about every device under the sun, but mobile internet wasn’t a thing in Australia until we had a proper mobile browser, and that was with the iPhone. I vividly remember whipping out my 3gs to browse the internet, people being amazed, but it also being absolute shit if you were on the move or in most places. I would say ubiquitous reliable mobile internet wasn’t a thing until maybe 2012-13
I was a post-doc during this period. I had a mobile phone but data was eyebleedingly expensive, and there wasn’t much to do on mobile. Most companies had a minimal web presence and very little directed towards mobile. I drove across the US in 2009 and even then it was better to use the information preloaded on my Garmin than the mobile web.
I remember it being iffy when I used it back then, the 8320 didn’t have GPS so it was trying to use cell towers to figure out the turn by turn. It was slower, but not as slow as the connection speed would seem because every page load wasn’t dependent on a thousand different CDNs and a hundred different trackers.
A dedicated GPS was essential for cross country (if you didn’t want paper maps or printouts).
Do you mean the Cisco iPhone from the 90s or the Brazilian iphone from the early '00s? I’m totally just taking the piss though, I know you mean the Apple one from the later '00s but it wasn’t that rare to have mobile internet before it, they were just riding the wave that was already breaking across society.
Apple had a major advantage though, lots of people were already eyeing their popular mp3 player, if a phone could be a phone, internet, and a good music player you can sync easily, it won for a lot of people. I couldn’t justify the price and really liked physical keyboards, by the time those became rare I disliked Apple too much to try them.
Somewhere I have my old BB 8320 from 2007, it was awesome because it had WiFi so much better speed when WiFi was available.
I’m with the op on this one, I had just about every device under the sun, but mobile internet wasn’t a thing in Australia until we had a proper mobile browser, and that was with the iPhone. I vividly remember whipping out my 3gs to browse the internet, people being amazed, but it also being absolute shit if you were on the move or in most places. I would say ubiquitous reliable mobile internet wasn’t a thing until maybe 2012-13
I was a post-doc during this period. I had a mobile phone but data was eyebleedingly expensive, and there wasn’t much to do on mobile. Most companies had a minimal web presence and very little directed towards mobile. I drove across the US in 2009 and even then it was better to use the information preloaded on my Garmin than the mobile web.
I remember it being iffy when I used it back then, the 8320 didn’t have GPS so it was trying to use cell towers to figure out the turn by turn. It was slower, but not as slow as the connection speed would seem because every page load wasn’t dependent on a thousand different CDNs and a hundred different trackers.
A dedicated GPS was essential for cross country (if you didn’t want paper maps or printouts).