Happy Birthday iPhone! From brave new world to best-selling smartphone

Five years ago, eager gadget fans lined up around the block to be one of the first to get the new iPhone, what Apple touted as its all-in-one telephone, iPod and Internet communications device.

Things haven't changed much in five years, have they?

To be honest, they most certainly have. When the iPhone was announced, analysts were quick to dismiss it as a flash-in-the-pan, sensationalized device. Matthew Lynn wrote in a column for Bloomberg that the iPhone would "fail in a late, defensive move."

(Personally, my favourite line of Lynn's piece is this gem: "The big competitors in the mobile-phone industry such as Nokia Oyj and Motorola Inc. won't be whispering nervously into their clamshells over a new threat to their business." When was the last time you saw someone with a clamshell phone?)

The Guardian was equally grim in their predictions for the iPhone's failure, quoting a survey that said only 31% of Americans and 27% of Japanese consumers wanted a device with multiple capabilities.

Five years later, the iPhone is consistently the top-selling smartphone in the U.S. and Japan last year, and knocked BlackBerry from the top spot as the best-selling smartphone in Canada in 2011. The iPhone now counts for 58% of Apple's total revenue, leaps and bounds from its humble beginnings back in 2007.

In addition to showing the world a consumer-friendly touch screen phone that boasted Visual Voicemail, multitouch gestures, HTML email and mobile YouTube videos, Digital Journal highlights, it was also the beginning of the massively lucrative app market. Over 25 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple's App Store, and Digital Trends anticipates the 50 billionth app will be downloaded before the year's end.

In honour of the iPhone's birthday, here's a look back at some of the device's early moments.

Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone at MacWorld 2007:

Apple's first iPhone commercial, aired the night of the Oscars in 2007:

And the answer to the question many likely asked shortly after the launch of the iPhone: will it blend?