Speed Is the Killer Feature
He&#x27;s kind of totally wrong about the phones and thus the speed being THE killer feature. First of all, Symbian phones, which <i>were</i> the market leader smartphones when the iphone was released were pretty fast. So were feature phones (i.e. dumb phones).<p>What iphone was a LOT better at than everyone else was UX. Of which speed is one component, of course. It&#x27;s funny how much people never get it although it happened in front of us, it happened to us. At the time I was working at Nokia Research and I remember my girlfriend telling me how his boss got this wonderful phone that you can take photos with and you can view them, etc. The funny thing is that I had such a phone since 2001. I have been working with smartphones for 6 years then, she knew it, she listened to me when I told her or others what I was doing (and then listen to others responding &quot;yeah, but phones are for making phone calls&quot;). She saw me browsing the net on my phones (a 9210 communicator and then a 9500), send emails from the beach, etc.<p>Still it somehow didn&#x27;t register. Because it looked like something that she&#x27;d never use. And then the iphone that did a lot <i>less</i> made her and basically everyone understand what a smartphone is. (Even though by then symbian smartphones were pretty common, most people didn&#x27;t use them as smartphones.)<p>So no, it&#x27;s not simply the speed. It&#x27;s the UX. And even if we talk about speed, it&#x27;s still not the speed, but it&#x27;s the perception of the speed, which a lot has been written about: delay (lagging) matters a lot even if speed on average is OK.