402244783_255d93fd21_oJust over eight-years ago I was in the auditorium on January 9, 2007 and witnessed history when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world. It seems weird that this happened only eight-years ago, and at the same time hard to appreciate how the technology world really changed after that keynote. Apple was a sliver of the computer market with less than 10-percent of the PC market, the emerging smart phone business belonged to Blackberry on the business side and Palm Treo on the non-business side and you needed to be hard-wired if you wanted any meaningful connection to the Internet. The idea of a touch-interface specifically designed for the form-factor limitations and function just wasn’t on anyone’s radar.

If anyone doubts how revolutionary this touch-interface was, here’s an example of the smart phone Google wanted to introduce circa 2006:
google phone v1

verizon-voyager001Between the announcement in January and the release at the end of June the whole smart phone market flipped on it’s head and suddenly everyone was doing touch (except Blackberry!). Here’s Verizon’s attempt at touch-based interface circa December 2007 (image on the right).

A little over a year ago I found that I had unedited video tapes from this keynote (yes, I was using non-solid-state media at the time). Hopefully I’ll pull together this footage with other shaky-cam video that I must have gotten off of my Treo. In the meantime, the most complete version of the keynote is still available directly from Apple in podcast form via this link. For those just wanting to press “Play” I was able to pull up the following version on YouTube (though how long it will remain on YouTube is never certain). Enjoy.

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