Wired are carry a rather US-centric report on the history of the iPhone. Dramatically titled "How the iPhone Blew Up The Wireless Industry", it's still a good read, and for those of us outside the US, an interesting look at the US carrier structure that every handset manufacturer has to deal with.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006... it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet."

Read the full article over at Wired ...