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The Times Review of the First iPhone: ‘Amazing’ but ‘Not Perfect’

It’s hard to recall, but there was a time when the iPhone wasn’t ubiquitous.

A time when a smartphone might have set you back a couple hundred dollars with a two-year contract, and BlackBerry was king. (“We’ll be fine,” one of the company’s chief executives reportedly said when the first iPhone was unveiled.)

How things have changed.

Among the latest iPhones, debuting on Tuesday, will be a premium model with a price tag starting at about $1,000. That’s a big jump from the first model, which was about half that price when Apple introduced it in January 2007. That year, a steady drumbeat of excitement turned into a frenzy. Soon it was being referred to as the “Jesus phone.”

(Read live analysis of Tuesday’s Apple iPhone event.)

David Pogue’s initial review of the device, published in The New York Times on June 27 that year, described it as “amazing” but "not perfect.”

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The first iPhone review appeared in The New York Times on June 27, 2007.

Mr. Pogue was one of only four reviewers who had been allowed to try out the iPhone before it went on sale.

That web browser? A “real dazzler.” Not to mention the “dead simple” operation and sleek profile.

This isn’t some stripped-down, claustrophobic My First Cellphone Browser; you get full Web layouts, fonts and all, shrunk to fit the screen. You scroll with a fingertip — much faster than scroll bars. You can double-tap to enlarge a block of text for reading, or rotate the screen 90 degrees, which rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view.

Finally, you can enlarge a Web page — or an e-mail message, or a photo — by spreading your thumb and forefinger on the glass. The image grows as though it’s on a sheet of latex.

For many, the iPhone wasn’t just a device, it was an experience. The Times’s Farhad Manjoo recently wrote about his introduction to the product.

It wasn’t the first smartphone, the first mobile computer, or the first anything, really.

But when I got my hands on the first iPhone in 2007, I knew it was unlike any machine I’d ever used before, and it would forever alter my tech-addled life. It turns out it probably altered yours, too.

In the early days, it was the simple things that were magical.

The internet in your pocket. Connectivity at all times — news, baseball scores, recipes. (How innocent we were.)

“Maybe all the iPhone hype isn’t hype at all,” Mr. Pogue mused in 2007. Even so, he continued, “some of the criticisms are justified.”

“There’s no memory-card slot, no chat program, no voice dialing,” he wrote. "The browser can’t handle Java or Flash, which deprives you of millions of Web videos.”

Other inconveniences: no video, no way to send “picture messages (called MMS) to other cellphones” and no third-party apps. (The App Store wasn’t born until 2008.)

Then there were typing woes. “Tapping the skinny little virtual keys on the screen is frustrating, especially at first,” Mr. Pogue wrote.

And what remains a constant bane for users: battery life.

“Apple says that the battery starts to lose capacity after 300 or 400 charges,” Mr. Pogue wrote. “Eventually, you’ll have to send the phone to Apple for battery replacement, much as you do now with an iPod, for a fee.”

No replaceable batteries? Times reporter Joe Nocera said at the time that this revelation “stopped me in my tracks.” He asked Apple how it planned to service its batteries, but he didn’t get a straightforward answer.

“It is about assured obsolescence,” Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group, a technology consulting firm, told Mr. Nocera in 2007.

As much as things have changed, some things really do stay the same.

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