[staunch]

1. Android would have ended up nothing like it is today if not for the iPhone. It would have been the best of a bunch of crappy smart phones. Phones like this: http://news.cnet.com/i/ne/p/2008/android_prototype_550x385.j...

2. Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google at the time. It's obvious that his position on the board of Apple and foreknowledge of the iPhone gave him a huge advantage.

[wvenable]

Given that companies like HTC were producing both touch based phones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Touch) and keyboard phones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wings) all around the same time -- it stands to reason that Android would be planning to support both (especially since even before the iPhone, the touch models were more popular).

[staunch]

There were other (much crappier) GUIs when the Macintosh launched too.

[wvenable]

Exactly. Just because one company came out with a great version doesn't mean everyone else wasn't working on it too. There were touch screen phones by the dozens before the iPhone came out -- why would Android ignore that.

[grkhetan]

"the touch models were more popular".... are you kidding? Are you saying touch smartphones were popular before iPhones? Do you have any statistics?

I hadn't seen even one of these before the iPhone (there were a few people who used them, but i would say their market share would be less than 1% in smartphones)

[kalleboo]

Aside from Blackberry and Nokia, weren't all smartphones before the iPhone touchscreen? Palm, Windows Mobile, Sony Ericsson UIQ...

Blackberry was never popular where I live, so I mainly saw touchscreen smartphones and Nokias (and I really hesitate to call the nokia symbian phones "smartphones")

[sjwright]

I think there's a pretty substantial difference between touch as defined by the Apple iPhone and "touch" as defined by Windows Mobile 5 or BlackBerry OS 4. Do fingernails and styluses really qualify?

[wvenable]

The TouchFLO UI from HTC (released on the first touch) was designed to be used by your fingers. What they lacked was the capacitive screen of the iPhone.

[fpgeek]

I hadn't seen even one of these before the iPhone (there were a few people who used them, but i would say their market share would be less than 1% in smartphones)

I think the rapid expansion of the smartphone market (led, in large part, by the iPhone) is tricking your eyes. Touch-screen smartphones were a significant part of the pre-iPhone smartphone market. But unless you were specifically paying attention to them, you wouldn't have seen that because the smartphone market was so much smaller back then.

[wvenable]

I owned both the Symbian based P800 (Touch screen, no face buttons at all) and then an HTC 6800 (touch screen, slide keyboard) years before the iPhone was ever released.

HTC alone had over 15 models of touch-screen phones released before the original iPhone. I think that kind of blows away "your less than 1%" made up statistic.