> The first iPhone was terribly limited compared to what came after it was not in any way terrible for the time.
At the time my feature phone had much better MMS, video calling, and J2ME apps. The first iPhone was a joke by comparison looked at through that lens, and detractors generally were looking at the fact it was this hobbled 2G device missing features that were common in other, cheaper phones. Oh, and the camera was absolute garbage, too.
You are not wrong but Apple predicted that none of those things mattered and they were proven right.
MMS worked well enough but was/is pretty limited. Video calling existed but postage stamp video at 8 frames per second was not something that anyone wanted to actually use. And don't get me started on J2ME, an ecosystem so vast that Google didn't even bother to include it in Android even though they are both based on Java. Although other phones had better cameras, none took what we would call an acceptable photos today.
What people did use all the time was the browser and only the iPhone had a decent one. That was the only thing that mattered. Heck, the iPhone wasn't even a very good _phone_ and even that didn't matter.
At the time my feature phone had much better MMS, video calling, and J2ME apps. The first iPhone was a joke by comparison looked at through that lens, and detractors generally were looking at the fact it was this hobbled 2G device missing features that were common in other, cheaper phones. Oh, and the camera was absolute garbage, too.