Why I’m still surprised the iPhone didn’t die

ZDNet:

What surprises me isn’t how popular the iPhone is now, but that it survived the first couple of years to become the influential cash-generating machine that it has become.

I’m just going to come out and say it — the original iPhone was junk. I know, that’s a scandalous thing to say, but to say otherwise is to do a disservice to the memories of the awesome handsets of the time. Call quality was terrible, it didn’t support multimedia messaging, and data speeds were slow even for 2007 because Apple chose not to support 3G.

I would usually say pieces like this are revisionism but the author, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, is someone whose writing I know and like and, upon reading it, you remember just how limited the original iPhone was. But his reasonings for why it eventually succeeded are sound.