The iPhone is four-years-old today. It was released in the US on June 29, 2007. Apple Stores closed for four hours before letting the public in at 6pm to buy the device. Apple sold 270,000 in the first 30 hours.
We had to wait until November to get it in the UK along with France and Germany. It wasn't until the next year that a full international roll-out got underway. Apple sold 6.1-million original iPhones over a year-and-a-quarter. And over these past four years, we've also seen the iPhone 3G, 3GS and now 4. A total of approaching 100-million iPhones have now been sold.
The iPhone became the seal on Apple's recovery from near bankruptcy. It compounded the success of the new wave of Mac computers that were starting to make inroads into Microsoft's dominance of the market.
The iPhone made smartphones usable and user-friendly. It blew the existing OS platforms - Nokia's Symbian and Mocrosoft's Windows Mobile - out of the marketplace as clunky, complicated and slow dinosaurs. And it sparked a new demand for easy-to-use touchscreen devices. Would Google's Android OS be here today if it hadn't been for the iPhone?
Let's not forget as well that the iPhone added a new word to the English language - app. Since the Apple App Store opened, it's seen 14,000,000,000 downloads. Last year, the App Store generated $1.8-billion in revenue, with Apple taking 30% and the developers getting the rest.
You can follow IJSMblog on Twitter and Facebook
Comments