The iPhone was unveiled on Jan. 9, 2007. AP It's eight years to the day since Steve Jobs first revealed the iPhone to the world.

It was nothing short of a miracle.

Before the iPhone came out, smartphones were clunky devices, half keyboard and half screen.

Full websites didn't run on mobile phones, so companies were forced to build weak, mobile versions of their sites.

The iPhone changed everything.

And yet the iPhone experience we all enjoy today didn't happen overnight. It took years of Apple adding feature upon feature. By today's standards, the original iPhone was a useless brick.

As a reminder of how far the iPhone has come, we've put together this slideshow on how the first iPhone was pretty crappy.

There's an important lesson here: People tend to quickly judge products on what they can and cannot do, while failing to account for how the product improves over time. As the iPhone shows, it's okay to start with limitations and gradually expand the product over the years.

As speculation mounts ahead of the release of the Apple Watch, it's worth keeping this in mind.