zlacker

I really don't think the iPhone (or even Android) was the equivalent of the Kenbak-1 in terms of smartphones. There were "smartphones" before the iPhone.

IMO the iPhone was the 90s PC era where these things got a lot better and more ubiquitous and less fragmented.

And (also in my opinion) coincidentally 90s led into an the era where overly dominant OS vendor(s) were crushing the fun and freedom out of computing. Phones are harder to escape from that than with PCs though.

>>antod+(OP)
Yep, I too remember Windows CE 5 on my Audiovox slide out keyboard phone which in 2006 was blowing people's minds. I got it purely so while on-call I wouldn't have to head home to handle incidents.

It was a great mobile computing experience but terrible at being a phone.

>>antod+(OP)
I'd argue the equivalent of iPhone/Android on the PC side would have been Windows 95, when things really became consumer focused and had their revolutionary explosion take off. That was "only" 28 years ago now

>>kllrno+nx
Agreed on the Win95 timeframe for the start of the take off phase the iPhone kicked off - just that PCs peaked, stagnated and got boring much less than 28yrs later (eg around 2010ish?).

I was disagreeing with the claim that PCs took longer than smartphones did to reach that plateau. They did take longer to reach the initial (Win95/iPhone) take off point though. Smartphones spent less time in the primordial phase - probably more a case of better internet availability though.