Eight years is quite a long time, especially in technology as today the original iPhone, basically the first smartphone was released in the United States eight years ago today. At the time the most popular phones were from Nokia, RIM and Palm. We have come along way since then with the ultra-powerful 64-bit iPhone 6 but back then it was state of the art. In 2007, there were touch-screen phones on sale but the iPhone seemed to do it in such as way which didn't make it intimidating, a year later the App Store also came to be which changed the way people got apps for their phone.
When it came out, the vast majority of technology journalists criticised the battery life (which was 5 hours) as well as the lack of a physical keyboard - so much so that a lot of people passed it of, especially Steve Balmer. But in typical Apple fashion the iPhone sold 726 million to date. On June 29 the phone was only avaible on AT&T as an exclusive and used the EDGE network to connect to the internet. The baseline model had 8GB of storage and was $599 on a two-year contract, just later that year in September the price was dropped to $399.
Fast forward to 2015 and the iPhone is now responsible for 70 percent of Apple's revenue.
In 2007 the original iPhone was released, in 2008 the iPhone 3G, in 2009 the iPhone 3GS, then in 2010 the redesigned iPhone 4, in 2011 the iPhone 4s with Siri, in 2012 the bigger iPhone 5 with 4G, in 2013 the iPhone 5s with 64-bit processor and then in 2014 the larger iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.