May 1, 2024

RIM Thought 2007 iPhone Was Impossible

Posted December 27, 2010 at 1:21pm by iClarified · 20068 views
RIM thought that Apple's claims for the 2007 iPhone were outlandish and impossible, a former employee reveals.

Shacknews poster Kentor writes, "I left RIM back in 2006 just months before the IPhone launched and I remember talking to friends from RIM and Microsoft about what their teams thought about it at the time. Everyone was utterly shocked. RIM was even in denial the day after the iPhone was announced with all hands meets claiming all manner of weird things about iPhone: it couldn't do what they were demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life, etc. Imagine their surprise when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it. It was ridiculous, it was brilliant."

Kentor notes that RIM's failure to foresee the future had alot to due with its background.

"Coming from a two-way pager background, RIM decided that phones should have two-way push synchronization of pretty much everything that Exchange provided along with a limited WML browser. The general thought was that phones would never have sufficient power density or radios sufficient bandwidth to allow anything more. That was incredibly predictably wrong, but it's how things went down."

Read More [via Electronista]