Orcon launched iPhones in NZ well before anyone else
These early iPhones weren't quite as as mobile as the present generation, nor were they 3G. They were pretty cool devices nevertheless… check out the Cidco iPhone for instance:
"A SUN Ultra Enterprise II server, that eliminates colour and fancy formatting so that web pages can be displayed on the small screen of the iPhone." That's hard core. You don't get that feature with the new iPhones, do you?
The dial-up modem was 14.4kbps only though, so I'm not sure why it's claimed to have 28.8kbps equivalent performance. Hardware compression maybe.
Other than that, the 16 greyscale 7.4" 640 by 480 pixel touch screen, a 50 per cent QWERTY slide-away keyboard, email, Netscape/Internet Explorer compatible browser that supports 128-bit SSL, cookies etc, make it a fully-featured device.
Not content with the Cidco model, Orcon got in the Big Daddy iPhone 2050 too. Just look at these features:
Nice. You can check out the iPhone 2050 simulator here.
The phones themselves were made by InfoGear Technology Corporation in Israel that shipped the first generation iPhone in 1997 and the second one in 1999. The iPhones floored Cisco, which bought InfoGear in 2000 and sued Apple for trademark infringement in 2007 for using the iPhone moniker.
I never saw these at the time and stumbled across the still active iph.net.nz through Duck Duck Go's search engine – has anyone used the above iPhones? What was the service like and how much did it cost?
Heard back from Seeby, who says:
The Cidco iPhone service was at the time a revolutionary service offered by Voyager some 13 years ago.
Basically the phone could do VOIP over dialup and also had web-browsing and email all built into a single platform that was easier to use than a PC.
The downside is that it was all proprietary, and needed an expensive server-side SUN server at the ISP to run it all.
When voyager was bought by MCI, they started heaving off customers (residential to Xtra), and Orcon ended up picking up the iPhone business. At it's peak we had around 180 customers on the service, which fell off over the years.
Cisco then bought the Cidco iPhone, and re-engineered the platform to be fully IP compatible.
Apple then brought out the iPhone years later, so that no-one will know what the hell these old clunky phones are anymore if you talk about them... Can't believe that website is still there! I personally built it about 8 years ago at least....
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Comment by James, on 14-Jul-2010 15:12
Why did those not take off! Would have been great for my gran. Although would be better with a "real" browser so as to avoid the Orcon dependance (and no doubt, poor rendering/script etc).
Perhaps somebody should come up with something similar, android based or something.
Comment by freitasm, on 14-Jul-2010 17:17
Wow... Two Orcon-related posts in a couple of days. You are being productive there, Juha!
Comment by nic.wise, on 14-Jul-2010 20:12
"A SUN Ultra Enterprise II server, that eliminates colour and fancy formatting so that web pages can be displayed on the small screen of the iPhone."
I love this bit. Given that a Sun Ultra is what, 10% the cpu speed of an iphone 4? (or 50%, depending on the model)
Oh, how times have changed.
Comment by nic.wise, on 14-Jul-2010 21:21
I wonder if Seeby has any left. I'd love to rock into an O2 store over here and say "hey, can I upgrade my iPhone?"
:)
Or better yet, the apple store "I'm told you are doing a recall on the iPhones - mine gets no 3G at all!"
(offtopic, kinda: my iphone 4 works just fine. Can repro grip of death, but never dropped a call or data....)
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Comment by billbennett, on 14-Jul-2010 12:31
...and from the breaking news department, a marginally-related story:
I was chatting to some Aussie tech journos the other day about the Apple iPhone and realised it is the descendent of the ICL One Per Desk.
It's a phone and a computer all in a single package. I used to have a freelance job writing for the ICL OPD magazine (which probably never had more than two or three editions) but I remember interviewing an engineer who said the company planned a portable version with a flat screen - and would one day "like to build one which could fit in the pocket".
Not bad for 1981.