[bryanlarsen]

Does the book discuss capacitive vs resistive touchscreens?

At the time you basically had two choices for touchscreens: resistive or capacitive. Resistive was "obviously" the way to go because it was far more accurate. Choosing capacitive was inspired -- when used with stubby fingers the accuracy problem was moot, and it allowed multi-touch.

Just before the iPhone came out I was fairly confident I knew what the future was. It was now possible to create a phone with the horsepower to run a real web browsers. 800x600 pixel screens were available which would display normal web pages nicely, and a resistive touch screen with a stylus would make them useful.

Then the iPhone came out. 320x480 screen meant normal web pages wouldn't display properly, inaccurate touchscreen meant tap targets needed to be increased massively. Why would anybody buy an iPhone which didn't allow you to install apps, and the web was unusable because it required rewriting every page since existing pages were unusable. Instead you could buy a phone which allowed you to install apps and which allowed you to usably access the web. Obviously the iPhone would be a failure. :)

[juliendorra]

Yes, the book explains how everything started from the capacitive touchscreen. The initial idea (2004-2005) was to build a Mac tablet computer based on touch screens. Bas Ording designed all the interactions we know, rubber band and inertial scrolling, the home screen… for a mac tablet!

So really the capacitive screen drove the interactions. Input first, just like the mouse on Macintosh or the stylus on Newton, everything then flows from there.

On the web browser, I disagree with you (sorry!), the killer app of the iPhone was that Safari was the same Safari, with the same capacity and rendering, than on desktop.

It was completely new. Yes, you had to double tap on complex, non responsive websites, but every single (non-flash) site would render the same.

My 640x480 HTC Universal with a plastic keyboard felt antiquated compared to the 320x480 iPhone, especially starting with the 3GS

[Lammy]

> The initial idea (2004-2005) was to build a Mac tablet computer based on touch screens.

There was lots of speculation about this starting in 2002 when “Inkwell” handwriting recognition showed up in Mac OS X Jagwire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkwell_(Macintosh)

https://www.macworld.com/article/155597/wacom.html

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mac-os-x/0596004605/ch0...

And related patent filings go as far back as 2000: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7564995B1/en

[cyberax]

> My 640x480 HTC Universal with a plastic keyboard felt antiquated compared to the 320x480 iPhone, especially starting with the 3GS

Opera Mobile existed at that time, though.

[juliendorra]

As I remember it, all these mobile browsers for Windows Mobile were not exactly the same code and rendering engine / javascript engine that on desktop. They were ports

As the iPhone OS was Mac OS at its core, Safari was exactly the same engines, and that was a quite novel and enticing promise: the real web in your pocket (minus proprietary plugins like Flash)

[cyberax]

Opera was a direct port, with some mobile adaptations. The problem was the IE6-only sites and other braindead web-development practices that affected Opera even on desktops.

[amarshall]

> Yes, you had to double tap on complex, non responsive websites

I suppose GP’s point is that the vast majority of websites in 2008 were “desktop”-only.

[jbverschoor]

But the double tapping was intelligent to zoom exactly what you meant.

Also tapping links was very easy

[wil421]

When I saw the first iPhone commercial I knew it was the future immediately. Pinch to zoom and all the pleasures of a touch screen. Plus a web browser comparable to a desktop but with mobile usability.

The web experience and usability of the original windows phone and blackberries was terrible. Nokia had a Swiss Army knife that didn’t sell or translate well to the iPhone/Android future.

[mikestew]

320x480 screen meant normal web pages wouldn't display properly

I’m not sure what you mean by that. The whole point of the demo was it rendered the New York Times website just as it rendered in desktop Safari. In contrast to, say, Windows Mobile which would butcher the rendering. If the touch targets were too small, well, through the wonders of multitouch, pinch to zoom in.

the web was unusable because it required rewriting every page since existing pages were unusable

You’re remembering a much different iPhone than I am. Are you sure not confusing it with WinMo 5/6? Because then we’d be in some agreement.

[bryanlarsen]

It rendered just fine on the sharp Zaurus or the Nokia phone sized Linux tablets, and was a much more pleasant experience than the iPhone pinch and zoom and pan and scroll.

But but on any mainstream phones. The phone I reference didn't exist. It could have and should have. If it did, perhaps Nokia would have survived.

[phire]

> It could have and should have.

From a technical perspective, yes. You are basically talking about the Nokia N800 but with a cellphone modem and a bit of effort spent shrinking the bezels down.

But from a product design perspective, I suspect it was impossible to make that leap. We are talking about the point when cellphones were at their very smallest. The 1st gen iphone with it's 3.5" display was considered to be large for a phone. Nobody thought mainstream users would be happy pocketing a phone with a "massive" 4.13" display.

And Nokia were only happy excluding the keyboard from the N800 because it was considered to be a content consumption device. At that time, smartphones were regarded as productivity devices (for email) and the physical keyboard was essential, which would have bulked out the device (See N810).

I don't think we could have gotten to today's large smartphones without first creating a viable browsing experience on an iphone sized display.

[bryanlarsen]

Not impossible, it only required a small amount of vision and risk taking. Which Nokia et al obviously lacked.

> Nobody thought mainstream users would be happy pocketing a phone with a "massive" 4.13" display.

Yet it was exceedingly obvious there was a very profitable sizeable niche of users that were willing to do so.

And it shouldn't have taken very much imagination to realize that "web in the pocket" was useful in 2008, and would quickly become much more useful in 2009, 2010 etc as the population of people with the web in their pocket grew and companies started to serve the market.

The big problem was that all of those phone companies were hardware companies. Putting Firefox in a phone was a challenge beyond them. Microsoft could have and should have done it, but they were dysfunctional at the time.

[jbverschoor]

I loved my zaurus SL-5000D. The keyboard was great, although the buttons were kind of clickey and you had to press them quite hard

[Gigachad]

Well to be fair, people did demand you be able to install apps and this feature was added shortly after.

I guess phones getting new features via updates was fairly uncommon at the time though.

[ranger_danger]

> Why would anybody buy an iPhone

Curious how you would respond to this argument today.