iBirthday – iPhone 10 Years Old

January 2017 saw the iPhone’s 10th birthday – on the 9th to be precise. Before the iPhone, Nokia and Blackberry were kings globally – after iPhone both were gone.

Looking back, the iPhone’s birth was an extraordinary event that has made Apple the most valuable company on the planet with income greater than many countries. Rather staggeringly, Apple is one thousandth of the entire world’s economy.

The iPhone both created and destroyed an industry. It did it by merging four of most ubiquitous modern gadgets available into a single rather beautiful device – the mobile phone, the digital music player, the camera and the computer. The computer brought with it the modern essentials of email and the Internet, incidentally taking a large chunk of revenue out one of the mobile telephony industry – text messaging.

Alongside all this we saw the exponential growth and innovation that came with the ‘app’ – “there’s an app for that” became a cliché but like all clichés it’s true. Many – and possibly now most – of these apps need an internet connection for them to work fully or even at all, and some say that without these the thing we now call “the cloud” would not be what it is today.

Part of its success was its use of a touch screen that covered the entire face of the device. Its clean and clear design made it a big hit with pretty much everyone almost instantly.

It’s hard to know what would have happened without the iPhone; it’s changed not just technology but society and human behaviour generally and most importantly Voipfone’s rather lovely (and free) GeoDivert^® app couldn’t exist without it.