> If I remember this was also a major criticism: Some other phones at the time could install third party software, the iPhone could not.
> However, despite the ability of installing third party apps existing in many phones, that never really took off before the iPhone SDK came out.
To be fair, though, the iPhone was also being compared against the PDA market of the time, where 3rd party apps had existed for a decade or more. In that regard, the iPhone was a partial step backwards (at the time). It gave all the connectivity a PDA user could want, but none of the apps that they were accustomed to. The PDA use-case was also why people thought it couldn't work without a stylus. For 15 years that's what PDAs had and it worked pretty well. The change in UI was significant for people making comparisons to that market, and not just the Blackberry market (which, at least all the ones I ever saw, relied more on the built-in keyboard than a stylus, did they ever have a model that used a stylus?).
> However, despite the ability of installing third party apps existing in many phones, that never really took off before the iPhone SDK came out.
To be fair, though, the iPhone was also being compared against the PDA market of the time, where 3rd party apps had existed for a decade or more. In that regard, the iPhone was a partial step backwards (at the time). It gave all the connectivity a PDA user could want, but none of the apps that they were accustomed to. The PDA use-case was also why people thought it couldn't work without a stylus. For 15 years that's what PDAs had and it worked pretty well. The change in UI was significant for people making comparisons to that market, and not just the Blackberry market (which, at least all the ones I ever saw, relied more on the built-in keyboard than a stylus, did they ever have a model that used a stylus?).