I was reading on the PC World site when I came across an article entitled, “Top 5 Things the iPhone Has Given the World.” Me, being a fan/non-fan of Apple and the iPhone thought “hey, that sounds interesting” so I gave it a read. Here are the top five things according to PC World that the iPhone has given the world:

1. The App Store – definitely a trend setter, nowadays every mobile OS has an app store and even some browsers, like Mozilla (Firefox) and Google (Chrome), have apps stores.
2. Touchscreens that Work – if you can recall, before the capacitive touchscreen, touchscreens were so ‘user friendly’ that people were punching them with ballpoints and car keys to try to make them work.
3. Jailbreaking – when the iPhone was introduced, it was AT&T all the way; so of course hackers took task in hand and made sure that the phone was useable on almost every provider and apps could be installed by circumventing the App Store.
4. Web Pages that Look Right – this is due to Webkit, the open source technology behind the Apple Safari Web browser. The success of Webkit ensured that it quickly spread to other platforms, including Google Android, Palm, BlackBerry, and Nokia OS.
5. The Smartphone – going back to the app store, in addition to making shareware popular, Apple’s App Store also turned the mobile into a computing device.  Today we don’t give the fact that our mobiles can be used as GPS devices or to browse the web.

Whether you’re an Apple lover or not, you have to give them credit – they set the precedent for the way we use our mobiles.

Image courtesy of Apple