[spogbiper]

I don't think Apple had a monopoly on capacitive screens. There were a couple other mobile devices that used them and came out around the same time. Maybe they tied up all/most the available production capacity for a bit?

Typing on the original iphone wasn't perfect, but it was generally better than tiny physical keyboards in many cases

[ActorNightly]

Physical keyboards were better than any touch screen one until the swipe typing became standard. You could type on them faster, and had more features like arrow keys, which were useful for smaller screens.

There was a whole era of autocorrect and the memes that came with it due to how much it was being used with touchscreen keyboards.

Of course the advantage of a full screen for things like web and media was more important, and making fullscreen phones was cheaper, so physical keyboards died out. The size of the screen increased as well.