3 ms·

The capacitive multi-touch screen was definitely new.

• joshlegs 8y ago
  honestly i think that was the biggest reason for its success. Blackberry was already a thing, but that big honking, clunky keyboard was just silly on a phone, and meant you had an exceptionally little amount of screen real estate. The developments in capacitive touch made a lot of room for other improvements to handheld devices.
  • rerx 8y ago
    I agree. I liked Palm OS back in the day and used to have two generations of Sony Clié PDAs with resistive touchscreens. The first one (an SL10) had a grayscale square touchscreen and a little "Graffiti" area below it where you could jot down simplified characters and some gestures. The second one (TG50) was really neat. It had a color screen (I remember watching videos and playing ScummVM Lucas Arts adventures on this in 2003 or 2004!) and it replaced the Graffiti area with an actual hardware keyboard. Text entry worked so much better than it used to with that pseudo-handwriting recognition. Much later, when I saw Apple and Android smartphones, I could not understand how anybody could stand the onscreen keyboards. But the truth is that the multitouch hardware allowed to progress these systems far enough that they would surpass earlier tiny physical keyboards.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]