There have been countless smartphones in the past two decades. But which ones stand out? Here are the 15 most important and influential smartphones ever.
If there’s any piece of technology that has made a significant impact on the lives of everyone, it’s the cellular phone — specifically, the smartphone. It’s literally a tiny computer that fits into your pocket, and brings a plethora of information, entertainment, and lets you capture visual memories or be productive wherever you go. Pretty much everyone has a smartphone these days, for better or for worse.
The iPhone was the first smartphone of its kind. It got rid of the clunky physical keyboards that were on phones and smartphones prior to its release, instead replacing it with a touch screen keyboard that was a joy to use and much more responsive than any touch screen that came before it. Plus, we didn’t even need a stylus! And the multitouch support meant we could interact with the touch screen in intuitive new ways that we didn’t think were possible at the time.
With the G1, the phone began as soon as Google announced the Open Handset Alliance and the Android platform in November 2007. In less than a year, in a partnership with T-Mobile and HTC , the G1 came to fruition. However, the G1 was not the first Android phone design — originally, the first Android smartphone was going to be a BlackBerry-like device, but after Apple revealed the iPhone, those plans were scrapped in favor of the G1 design.
Palm’s webOS is the main factor behind the Pre’s influence on the smartphone industry — it was one of the first devices, besides the iPhone, to launch with a multitouch interface. With webOS, the interface was heavily gesture-based, which both iOS and Android drew inspiration from. For example, one of the key features of webOS was how one would close applications by using a finger to flick them off of the screen, closing the application from running in the background.
But that wasn’t all the iPhone 4 brought to the table. This was the first iPhone with a high-resolution Retina display with 326 pixels per inch , which is double that of the original iPhone. You could no longer see individual pixels on the screen, and that was a huge deal at the time. This set the stage for every iPhone that came after it and also upped the ante for the competition.
Because the BlackBerry Bold 9900 was in the time of the iPhone and Android phones, BlackBerry focused more on performance with the Bold 9900. This came in the form of the Liquid Graphics touch screen with BlackBerry 7 OS, which delivered “fast and smooth performance with highly responsive touch-based navigation, web browsing, pictures, video, and graphic intensive games,” according to BlackBerry.
Ever since the introduction of the Galaxy Note, smartphones have just gotten bigger and bigger. Though a 5.3-inch display nowadays seems small compared to the almost 7-inch displays that are commonplace, the original Galaxy Note size was the one that started the trend of big phones. While it only had a 4MP camera, the Ultrapixel tech had low-light fidelity for unmatched photo quality in 2013. And with HTC Zoe, you could shoot multiple frames before and after the main photo in a capture, so you can actually scroll back and restore those missed moments. There was also HTC Gallery, which would send you video highlights – a feature that both Google Photos and Photos on iOS would adopt later on.
The Nexus 5 was also important because it showed that Google could make great phones with the right partnerships. Of course, Google is now making its own hardware and processors with the Pixel lineup, but still, the Nexus 5 was a fantastic device, especially among the geeky. It was comfortable, powerful, and affordable — a rare combination that few other phones had managed to achieve as well as the Nexus 5 did.
OnePlus One The OnePlus One was the first product from OnePlus, and it’s another one of those phones that redefined what a budget or mid-range phone should be, despite being from a brand new company. With the LG G6, we had a unique 5.7-inch display that also had a 2:1 aspect ratio , which was taller than the standard 16:9 that most smartphones were previously using The LG G6 shipped with Android 7.0 “Nougat” and also came with LG UX. A few of LG’s own in-house applications had enhanced landscape modes that took advantage of the 18:9 aspect ratio that the device offered, and the screen size was perfect for split-screen mode with multiple apps.
The iPhone X also inspired Android phones to begin eliminating buttons and move towards a more gesture-based interface of their own. And with the notch introduced by the iPhone X, Android phones tried to one-up Apple with more creative ways of housing front-facing cameras and face recognition sensors.
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