This time last year mobile devices seemed really stale ... it had been years since meaningful change. There were lots of promises and rumors of good stuff to come, yet actual new devices all seemed to be hardly any different at all from the tired ones you held in your hand.

Small improvements here and there, but the big problems remained. Then the iPhone became the first of the new mobile platforms to become more real ... and in the past year it has crashed into the mobile markets, becoming the first device to be a real enabler for what innovation in clouds and cloud-based apps are beginning to deliver.

The ability of these new devices to meaningfully participate in general web-based stuff is what sets them apart.

But that was not so obvious a year ago ...

Forced to Change
About that time I left my old reliable Treo 700 in the seat pocket in front of me ... minutes after landing from a red-eye to Europe, groggy and incoherent, unable to go back and retrieve the phone because of the (well-posted) rules in Lisbon.

This turned out to be about a week before the iPhone intro. I'd promised to all that I wouldn't just run out and get an iPhone, but what could I do?

What I actually did do was buy the current Treo (750p) and the iPhone, and did my own mini-bakeoff, with the loser to be returned ignominiously. I'd been a Palm OS user for about seven or eight years (and two billion Palm corporate reincarnations), and been part of it going from responsive, stable, reliable hand-held goodness to a frustrating steam-driven, unable to handle threads handheld time bomb that regularly crashed during phone calls ... ARGGGHHHH.

Tried but couldn't get over the WM6 UI - yes it had a stable kernel, but every time I'd tried a WM device it seemed like interaction had been governed by the "5th People's Directorate of Handheld Design".

Pretty much the same for the Blackberries that I'd tried, though they've definitely evolved fast, and hung on to that addicting email / texting / now twittering title. Still no substitute for real keys for that stuff.

Yet, in the end my two week trial turned into two days - the Treo went back into hiding, and I hung on to the iPhone.

Why I Picked the iPhone Last Year
In the end it was easy - the iPhone was simply the first handheld that really did a decent job at web stuff. Particularly great for keeping up with RSS feeds, blogs, etc.

It was decent at email, contacts, texting, twittering etc - decent, but not great.

But the ability to take care of a bunch of web tasks far more than made the switch compelling for me. The wifi took the sting out of the slow mobile data connection, which helped. Besides, it never crashed during a call ... not once. The stability alone was worth something.

Probably best of all, it turned out to be surprising durable. I think I dropped it hard about a gazillion times, and it kept working fine. Still does.

What has Bugged Me All Year Long
Lack of cut & paste is just stupid - still is, for that matter - but beyond that it's been lack of

1. an SDK
2. active-sync
3. 3g

Well, all but the cut & paste are fixed with the iPhone 3G, with some cool bonus stuff as well (gps, ostensibly improved batter life, better initial price).

On the shaky list remains Apple's irritating reluctance to approve developers and AT&T's handling of data / voice plans.

Reaction to the iPhone 3G
Michael Arrington is lavish, Alex Miller is funny, Om Malik is well-reasoned, many analysts are ga-ga. Highlights include:

I Am A Member Of The Cult Of iPhone (Arrington)

I heard Apple’s new iPhone can sense your thoughts ... I heard the new iPhone can change diapers and release a lemony fresh scent ... I heard the new iPhone eliminates entropy (tweets by Alex Miller during the intro)

it’s time to shift attention to the most important question about this device: How much money will it make for Apple and its carrier partners? (Om Malik)

look for units sales of 14 million in calendar 2008 and 24 million in calendar 2009 (Mike Abransky, RBC Capital)

My Take
I think the bottom line likely reality is really pretty simple - Apple is going to sell about a billion iPhones, and with the release of the 3G the platform itself is reaching critical mass as a meaningful mobile device.

While it is by no means even vaguely close to perfect, it's the first of the next-generation devices that seemed for so long to have been stuck in a maddeningly crazy "coming soon" time warp ... to move out of that time warp and actually become real. And it is very real.

Android could be next, with everyone else fighting it out to either stay relevant or perhaps also gain relevance. Btw, here's a shout out to CrazyBob and the rest of the Android team for forcing Apple to accelerate the SDK release ... looking forward to seeing production Android devices in the mix.

I think this the iphone is the first device to begin to match what's happening in the web - particularly clouds & cloud-architected apps - enabling fundamentally new stuff... particularly with the SDK. Of course, Apple could still screw this up, but I hope not.

Besides, it's actually not too bad for old-school phone calls!