OT but still an interesting stroll down memory lane! Phil Pugliese 02 Jul 2017 10:11 UTC

Found this in my daily feed from DowJones;

Time-Traveling Back To The First IPhone
Forget everything the physicists have said: Traveling back in time is super simple.
Step 1: Get an original iPhone. (Craigslist pro tip: Make sure it powers up before handing over the cash.)
Step 2: Find a cellular carrier that still has a so-very-slow 2G network. (Hello, T-Mobile!) Insert the SIM card into your new old iPhone.
Step 3: Pack a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, knitting supplies, fidget spinner, whatever you need to pass the time. There's a lot of waiting on technology in the past.
Step 4: Power on phone. Welcome to 2007.
To commemorate the iPhone's arrival in stores a decade ago this Thursday, I locked my iPhone 7 in a box and challenged myself to live with the original for a week. I made it 12 hours--12 full hours of complete frustration and complete amazement. I urge you to try it yourself. If you can't, join me in my day-in-the-life video above, then read on.
What did I learn? In 2007, the iPhone was truly a technological wonder. Today, it is truly terrible. Actually terrible. When I called my mom, it was so muffled I wondered if she was in an airplane lavatory at 30,000 feet. (She wasn't. Hi Mom!) But that's the best part of being transported 10 years into the past: You can clearly see the mobile technology advancements we now take for granted.
Speeds. You like your 4G LTE? Pfft, the original iPhone didn't even have 3G. It ran only on a 2G EDGE cellular network. It takes nearly a minute to fully load our president's Twitter feed in the old iPhone's Safari browser (with an iPhone 7 on LTE, it takes just 5 seconds). You can already have eaten lunch by the time it loads your lunch-spot search results ("pizza") in the Maps app. Wi-Fi is your new best friend, but even that's slower. (Fun fact: AT&T no longer even has a 2G network. I had to call AT&T customer service to have the phone unlocked.)
Screens. If the iPhone 7 Plus had a kangaroo pouch, it could easily carry around the original iPhone. The larger screen feels like a 5.5-inch Texas next to a 3.5-inch Oklahoma. The first thing most people now utter upon seeing the original iPhone: "Cute!" What's not cute? The visible pixels and the washed-out colors when you aren't looking at the screen head on.
Software. It was touch-screen magic! A screen that becomes a keyboard! Pinch to zoom to see the details of a photo! Swipe through the colorful album covers! But there are no emojis, predictive text or Siri. No third-party apps to share or edit photos. Heck, you can't even text a photo, or load most websites. No Apple Music or Spotify. (You know what it does have though? A headphone port.)
The original iPhone received iPhoneOS updates through 3.1.3--but it never saw the rebranded iOS, which arrived at version 4. The first iPhone did eventually get an App Store, but today, most apps require iOS 8 or later to work, so it feels like a ghost town.
Stills. The 2-megapixel camera takes surprisingly decent shots when the lighting is good. (I mean, I'd still carry a point-and-shoot.)
But want to take a shot where the light isn't great? Don't even try. Want to turn on the flash? There isn't one. Shoot video? No can do. And if you want to take a selfie? Use a mirror... like a caveperson! Seriously, no front-facing camera.
Stamina. When you think about how little this iPhone can do, it's pretty nuts that I still had to charge it by lunchtime. This battery may be old, of course, but people who owned the first iPhone remember the midday top-up. It was BlackBerry's biggest bragging point. (We know how that ended for BlackBerry.) That said, you don't need to go back to 2007 to experience "Low Battery" iPhone frustration. Here's hoping that isn't the case 10 years from today.