[teekert]

I do think iPhone is often made more mythical than it was. Sure it was good and we could finally use our sausage fingers to navigate it. But I recently heard someone say on Radio that iPhone was the first phone with a touch screen. Meanwhile me an the guys (yeah all guys) we’re rocking Sony Ericsson P800’s and the like in 2003,4,5.

I had an HTC touch when iPhone came out and I was most envious that you could do two finger zooming in Google maps instead of tapping zoom buttons.

[Agraillo]

Many things Apple related are very often about applying existing technologies to a novel place. Many forget that the touch screens at the time were resistive [1] that required pressing (small but nevertheless) at the screen and mostly usable with styluses. As long as I recall the novelty was to apply a capacitive touch screen [2] to navigation, it does not require physical force and that's where the fingers shined.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_touchscreen

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive_touchsc...

[teekert]

Sure. But one can argue that capacitive touchscreens were about to happen anyway (like ARM laptops..). And HTC with their touchflow were moving into sausage friendly UIs.

But I agree, Apple is absolutely good at taking all this tech at the right time and making a compelling product. Steve insisted on glass/capacitive and that is just the best choice. Also, the UI didn’t feel like a layer (that you could easily get out off) as with touchflow. I’m also an iPhone user atm. Switched from Android about 3 years ago. The whole experience feels like higher quality to me still now. Although I have friends that would argue against that.