Has the iPhone changed the world? Perhaps not, and I'm certainly not an Apple fanboy. But the iPhone brought innovations that have infected the rest of the tech world. There's no denying that where Apple treads first, the rest of the world follows.
So here are the top five things the iPhone has given us in the years since the first version was released.
1. The App Store
To play off of what Nicole Kidman's character says in "To Die For," you're not anybody nowadays unless you have an app store.
Every mobile phone platform has one, and even browsers are getting in on the act, with Mozilla and Google adding app stores for Firefox and Chrome respectively. The venerable Mac OS X operating system will get one in the New Year and, as history has continually proved, Windows will surely follow (there are already rumors that Windows 8 will have one).
The iPhone App Store did a clever thing: It made software cool. Somehow Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field was strong enough to make us believe that a new utopia had been created. Nobody wants to install boring shareware, but now everybody wants to install apps. And let's be honest--shareware and apps are the same old thing.
The App Store is little more than a rebranding exercise. But it's been perfectly implemented, and only Apple could have pulled it off.
2. Touchscreens That Work
How easily we forget.
Before the iPhone popularized capacitive touchscreens, any device branded as "touch capable" usually came with a stylus--a pen without ink that was used to write on the screen. These were small and easily lost, leading to expired ballpoints often being used as replacements, or even household keys.
Ouch! It was a less than perfect situation, and is probably why touchscreens never found much use beyond specialized hardware, such as Palm PDAs.
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