8 features that smartphones didn’t have 10 years ago

Today, it’s hard to imagine a smartphone without a touchscreen display. But most of the models that were available ten years ago featured screens that weren’t touch sensitive, so you had to use hardware keys and buttons to interact with them. The handsets that did have touchscreen displays in 2005 offered resistive touch panels which weren’t exactly finger-friendly, and didn’t support multi-touch. The original Apple iPhone (announced in January 2007) was the first to sport a multi-touch display.

Pictured here: the

HTC Universal

, a Windows Mobile smartphone from 2005 with a 640 x 480 pixels resistive touchscreen display.

The quality of photos and videos that smartphone cameras can take has grown tremendously in the last decade. Back in 2005, the best smartphone cameras that you could get were arguably Nokia-made ones, which were featured in Symbian-based handsets like the

Nokia N90

and

Nokia N70

. Both the N90 and N70 had 2 MP sensors that produced 1600 x 1200 pixels photos, and 352 x 288 pixels videos which were no match for what point and shoot cameras could deliver. In 2015, most high-end smartphones can match the quality of photos shot with dedicated compact cameras. Video recording is also very good, 4K recording becoming the norm on high-end handsets.

Pictured here: the Nokia N70.

While 3G was available in 2005, it was limited to CDMA2000 and UMTS, which couldn’t offer data transfer speeds higher than a few Megabits per second. The first HSDPA-capable handset, the Samsung SCH-W200 (which wasn’t even a smartphone, but a feature phone) came out in 2006. Now, thanks to LTE networks and LTE-capable chipsets, smartphones can provide data transfer speeds of hundreds of Megabits per second (at least theoretically).

Pictured: the second generation

Motorola Moto E

, one of the cheapest LTE smartphones of 2015 ($149.99).

In 2005, having 8 GB of internal memory inside a smartphone was not possible. Most smartphone users had to make do with 128 MB (or less) of storage space. At the same time, memory cards were also limited to MBs. Today, 16 GB and 32 GB internal memories and microSD cards are common (with

128 GB

being the maximum internal storage space available).

Pictured:

Samsung Galaxy S6

and

Galaxy S6 edge

, both of which offer up to 128 GB of storage space.

While some users may not rely on fingerprint recognition too much, the technology is now widely spread, thanks to Apple (which introduced Touch ID in 2013 on the iPhone 5S) and Samsung (which popularized fingerprint scanners with the launch of the Galaxy S5 in 2014). The world’s first smartphone to have a fingerprint scanner was the

LG eXpo

, which came out in 2009.

Pictured: an Apple iPhone 6 with Touch ID.

The fact that current smartphones can record high-quality (or at least decent) video, in addition to featuring LTE, HSPA+, or Wi-Fi, allowed them to become the perfect devices for live video streaming on the go. Thus, live streaming apps like Meerkat and Twitter’s Periscope are very popular.

Pictured:

Periscope for iPhone

.