The day Apple introduced the iPhone, the home page of Samsung’s website showed… washing machines. Or so they say. What is certain is that the technology, design and concept of the iPhone caught the entire industry off guard. So much so that the first Android phone had a QWERTY keyboard in mid-2008.
A change that surprised the whole industry
HTC Dream was the first phone in history with Android. A really interesting phone for the time, yes, but with something that in 2008 was perhaps already a bit out of context. Before the iPhone, there were several phones that featured a full QWERTY keyboard. Whether moving the screen, as in this case, or displaying part of it, a keyboard was something interesting.
However, everything changed with the arrival of the iPhone. the virtual keyboard introduced by Apple in 2007 with the iPhone original marked a before and after in mobile phone design. So it may surprise us that the first Android phone in history, the HTC Dream, comes with one of these physical keyboards.
The truth is that developing a device doesn’t just take a few months. It’s even possible that HTC started its design and development before the launch of the original iPhone, but the truth is, it’s getting attention. We don’t know if the company called the iPhone’s virtual keyboard a “fad,” like others did at the time, or just Android 1.0 did not have proper support for on-screen keyboards.
Anyway, soon after, on-screen keyboards became the norm. A keyboard that was there when you needed it, in its different variants, but which disappeared completely the rest of the time. What we all take for granted today might not be a year after the original iPhone, but clearly marked the way forward.
