Picture yourself back in the 2006 holiday season: if you were a geek, you were most likely struggling with your Windows Vista upgrade (those were the days!) and dreaming of owning that then-brand-new smartphone. More likely than not, it had a physical keyboard, had a rudimentary built-in web browser and definitely not a multi-touch display. When the iPhone first launched, the whole smartphone space was taken into a whole different direction.
As you can tell from the image below, Apple’s competitors have evolved greatly since the iPhone’s 2007 release, but there’s a pattern they all seem to have followed: all of Apple’s competitors now look like the iPhone in one way or the other. Back in 2006, the predominant form factors were clamshells and small screens surrounded by static plastic buttons, yet today most major smartphones don’t even have many physical buttons; in fact, most of their interface is comprised almost solely of a large multi-touch display, much like the iPhone.
Of course, all of Apple’s competitors attempt to emphasize the differences they have between each other, but in the end all share 90% of the features. We’ll have to wait until the next trend starts to watch everyone blindly following it.
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