Blackberry Storm was released in November 2008, which is a year after the iPhone, not 2 years. The first Android phone came out just a month before in October. I was in NYC for job interviews then I saw billboards for both everywhere.
Yup. What I would note is that Palm, like 7 months later, had the first real competition but Sprint just screwed them. Android took until the Droid to be competitive and the Nexus One/Galaxy S to be actually convincing as an alternative.
This isn't true at all. The G1 (first widely marketed android phone) was superior in all ways but one: Marketing. The iPhone wasn't really competitive on the hardware front until the 3g which finally added GPS and a fast cellular modem.
The iPhone 3G was released before the G1, and period reviews especially noted how the G1 didn't measure up. In general, if something non-free is wildly successful the explanation is more than “marketing” and that certainly sounds like it's the case:
> The HTC hardware and Android OS that powers it lack the polish and depth of even the iPhone 1.0 in most respects.
> My first-generation iPhone with iPhone OS 2.1 feels faster and slicker than this late 2008 G1.
> The G1 has a single-finger touchscreen that supports a few gestures, like sliding. After working with an iPhone for many months, the lack of multitouch stands out as a big loss, but those new to touchscreens are unlikely to find it a big deal. A more critical problem, however, is the lack of sensitivity in the touchscreen.
> The browsing experience is frustrating and awkward, and I expected far better. With the WebKit browser core being used by both Nokia and Apple, and Google immersed in its own Chrome project, I thought the G1 might include a browser that had something unique to offer. Instead, it plays like something from about 2006.
I was wrong. The 3GS was the first model with GPS, which came about five months after the G1. The G1's touchscreen was very comparable to the Apple devices I was building software for at the time - I think the multitouch capability was there, and really the only use was pinch to zoom... which I seem to recall working on the G1 after an OS update. Regardless, the web browser part was rather the opposite - the G1 with it's weird trackball could be used to browse desktop sites and at the time, most websites were not responsive. Also, there were places where android used long-press... which Apple added later. Regardless, I was fascinated at the time how Apple was able to outmarket everyone with iPhone... and equally fascinated with how quickly the army of Android vendors materialized. Fun times.
A lot of us were also there at the time. It was considerably more than marketing, and a lot of companies said they had iPhone killers which promptly failed in the market. It took a solid half decade for the competition to really firm up because there were a lot of little details which required time to get right.
It was definitely eye-opening to see people’s usage habits shift so quickly. I know multiple large organizations who completely reapproached how they developed internal applications because the executives no longer accepted IT’s unwillingness to support mobile access. I’d previously thought that would never happen.
Amusingly, the one which had a damaging public breach did not have it due to allowing phones access as some had predicted but when one of IT’s managed laptops was stolen out of someone’s car and, unlike an iPhone, it didn’t have storage encryption enabled.
