I understand that was more because AT&T/Cingular was the only carrier willing to allow a phone that they literally weren’t allowed to see until launch day onto their network. Didn’t the other carriers baulk at Apple and tell them to pound-sand for thinking they’d let them use their network without any oversight of their phone’s software system or similar?
In Europe (and, I would guess, everywhere) everybody can launch a GSM phone without cooperation of phone companies.
You do need to pass certification tests, but those are set by governments. Those tests may be defined with lots of input from industry and may be executed by institutes created by manufacturers as a group, but AFAIK, those institutes are so independent from the manufacturers that they won’t let commercial interests affect test results.
The issue with the original iPhone was that consumers were used to get a ‘free’ phone with their subscription. To do that, manufacturers need to work with a phone company.
The iPhone’s success was not a given and Steve Jobs had fairly stringent ideas about pricing. That made it hard to find a phone company to work with. IIRC, AT&T was a bit of an underdog in the market. That made them fall for Steve’s offer.
Yes. At the time, Verizon was doing things like completely blocking Bluetooth for anything other than headsets, because they wanted to force people to use their mobile data to get pictures off their phones.
At the time Verizon also mandated every phone on their network had a whip style antenna. The networks had a stranglehold on the handset market, and it took the iPhone to break it.
The whip antenna thing is absolutely not true, at least for smartphones. I had a Palm Treo and multiple BlackBerries on Verizon, predating the iPhone, which definitely didn't have whip antennas. The Treo had a little nub, and the BlackBerries had no external antenna.
