Touchscreen · 2007
The Glass Slab
No keys at all, just one big sheet of glass and a single button. People queued round the block for it, then spent the evening pinching photos to make them bigger.
Looks like
Modelled on these phones. Not affiliated with their makers.
We're building this one next. The Brick is ready to try today.
In real life
The real phones that inspired The Glass Slab. Photos from Wikimedia Commons, credited under each one.
iPhone (1st gen)Photo: Sevela.p, CC BY-SA 3.0 iPhone (1st gen)Photo: Carl Berkeley, CC BY-SA 2.0 iPhone (1st gen)Photo: Blake Burris, CC BY 2.0
Specs
- Year
- 2007
- Form factor
- Touchscreen
- Screen
- Colour touchscreen
- Input
- Multi-touch glass + one button
- Battery
- About a day
A short history
On 9 January 2007, Steve Jobs stood on stage at Macworld in San Francisco and introduced the iPhone: an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator, all in one. It went on sale in the US on 29 June 2007, and in the UK that November.
It looked like nothing else at the time. Most of the front was a 3.5-inch touchscreen, with no keypad and only one round button below it. You used it with your fingers, not a stylus: swipe to unlock, flick to scroll, pinch to zoom in on a photo or a web page.
What it was like
The first iPhone was not the fastest phone around. It had no 3G, a 2-megapixel camera, and no way to install apps from other developers. That only came in 2008, with the App Store. You couldn’t even copy and paste.
But browsing real web pages felt like magic after the tiny screens of keypad phones. Scrolling bounced at the end of a list, photos turned when you turned the phone, and people passed it around at parties just to let friends try it.
Why people still remember it
Within a few years, almost every phone looked like this: a slab of glass with very few buttons. It was the start of the smartphone world we still live in, and the beginning of the end for the phones on the rest of this site.
The Glass Slab is our take on that phone, and it’s coming soon. In the meantime, try The Brick.