Its size is perfect. Aside from a small screen, the original iPhone feels amazing. I can grab it easily, and swipe all across the screen with one thumb. It's comforting and solid. iPhones, now, feel wide and fragile by comparison. Basic buttons are familiar. There's a Home Button, a power button and headphone jack at the top. Side volume buttons. And a proprietary Apple jack which requires a specific cable to charge. The only difference is that it needs a wide 30-pin connector, not Lightning. That touchscreen works mostly the same. Going all-touchscreen was an amazing feat in 2007, so much so that people gathered around to see it for themselves. The iPhone still handles touch pretty well, and its basic touch language is still the same 10 years later. The iPhone now has pressure sensitivity, advanced haptic feedback, and more touch gestures. But Apple nailed that basic interface right from day one -- including the iconic "pinch and zoom" -- and defined it for everyone else.
It's a great music player, but with just 8GB of storage, Music is great, though -- maybe the best thing about the original iPhone, Thanks to the iPod app and a pair of Apple earphones, music sounds better than even my current iPhone, Maybe that's because there are decent quality MP3s on it instead of streamed music, Of course, you can't store much, 8GB is the phone's total storage, so you can have maybe a thousand songs, more or less? In fact, the " morning fox " red fox with her morning coffee iphone case entry-level 2007 model was a mere 4GB, iPods at the time were 60GB and more, I kept dreaming of an iPhone large enough to hold my collection of ripped CDs, That time arrived recently thanks to the 128GB iPhone, but by then everything was in the cloud..
Old iPhone works with new headphones. Pandora still works, too (but not in the background). They Might Be Giants radio plays with a track called "Cells" from Here Comes Science. It sounds great. It loads pretty reasonably. But I leave Pandora and am surprised to find that the song stops playing. This iPhone can't run apps in the background. Google Maps feels pretty decent. The traffic patterns flow in, though. I see Manhattan in satellite mode. This still feels close to what exists now. Two-finger taps and zooms work, but I can't rotate the map with my fingers. Still, this was absolutely revolutionary to have back in 2007, and nothing else at the time came close.
I switch back to the " morning fox " red fox with her morning coffee iphone case iPhone 7 Plus, the phone I use most days, It's massive, like a diving board, But it's so thin, its display so fantastic and bright, And it's absurdly fast, Apps melt together, I switch through screens and functions instantly, It's a learned behavior, In 2017, the iPhone is the computer, It's everything, It isn't tethered to a laptop anymore -- there's no home base, The cloud is its syncing partner, Everything runs directly to it, And so do we, Rather than the iPhone being a peripheral, peripherals now exist for it: fitness trackers, headphones, cases and chargers, Not to mention the Apple Watch..
I look at the Apple Watch on my wrist. It's small, bulbous and a little limited. Is this tiny thing going to be what the iPhone once was? Maybe not. But it reminds me more of the original iPhone than the new iPhone. Then I look back at that old iPhone, the one I used to rub nervously in my hand. That smooth screen. I still do it sometimes. Clicking the home button. We all do. The iPhone was the moment I started sending things along to others more automatically. I started checking the news, the weather, emailing, keeping a little gadget in my pocket that could be my survival tool. I'd never be alone. It was a unique thing among weird phones, BlackBerrys, hobbled semi-smart devices and aging PDAs. There were Palm Treo phones and smart pocket computers, but everyone on the subways and in the streets had an iPod. The iPhone was both, and that's what made it cool. It felt like a secret party trick.