It's funny how, with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see that my argument wasn't flawed, it was just solvable. The smartphones that were so popular with the business users were surpassed by the iPhone because it ended up having a massive ecosystem of apps around it that back in January 2007 we really had no way of foreseeing.

It doesn't matter that Word and Excel still aren't on the iPhone because there are tons of other ways of accessing and updating documents and spreadsheets. The iPhone wasn't the only device that gave you access to your email, the internet, even a window to your Mac or PC back in the office. But it was the one device that did it well. Who cares if it wasn't, and still . It's not like we use it to make calls.

I was right that consumers didn't want to spend money on data but there was a solution to that too. What ended up happening was the mobile networks (at least in the UK) gave the original iPhone users free () data plans. They sucked us in and now we are hooked. At a time where it seemed the only point of 3G was to send photos and browse the web (actually, that wasn't even the web), Apple put a device in our hands that opened up a whole new world, and the networks took away any worry about how much our new browsing habit was going to cost us.

And now look. We all wondering around using our Google Maps () to navigate, and then once there we are 'checking in' on Facebook so our friends know where we are. Or an even more extreme example, we are finding our where our friends are via Find My Friends. Who could have anticipated such life changing opportunities were just around the corner.