What was the last dumb phone you had before your first smartphone?
I rocked a Samsung Alias 2 for 4 years before I got an iPhone 5. The e-ink keyboard was awesome how it changed when you flipped the screen open to portrait or landscape.
I had the phone pictured in the post. I even activated the browser. It was 100% trash. WAP sites and browsers were nothing like even the first iPhone. That’s what made the iPhone such a shock, no one had browsed the web like that on a phone before and it was, no exaggeration, a game changer.
As for the camera the first iPhone camera was garbage comparatively but still was better than most if not all flip phones. I have picture back from when I had that phone pictured in the post and they are a grainy mess.
Well yeah, things improved. I guess the real difference is that the smart phone is actually a mobile general purpose computing device, which, by the way, also makes a call. My reason for buying iPhone 1 was to combine two devices in one - iPod and mobile phone. I did not expect that e-mail, web browsing and camera were so good. But the real game changer was an App Store, which came later.