3 ms·

What do you mean by that?

83457 6y ago
Sounds obvious now but pinch to zoom was a big new feature on iPhone that traditional phones, even those with touch capability, did not have muti-touch. Part of this was capacitive touch screen technology that few other devices had at the time, instead having cheaper resistive which pretty much required a stylus to do anything but press in a particular spot on screen. I don't believe android devices had muti-touch originally even though they had capacitive touch screens. Touchpads on laptops and touch screens added multi-touch years later.
- dTal 6y ago
  I don't think it was so much that resistive touchscreens were cheaper; rather, the dominant mobile interaction model had for a decade been oriented around styluses - handwriting recognition, small UI elements - and resistive touchscreens are simply more precise. Even with a capacitive screen, direct physical interaction such as smooth scrolling and pinch-zooming requires graphical horsepower that just wasn't on the table until around the time the iPhone came along.
- salamandersauce 6y ago
  Yeah. The T-Mobile G1 lacked multitouch gestures. You could hack them in though as the hardware supported it. I think it was a patent issue or someething which was why it was left out.
masswerk 6y ago
> What do you mean by that? Smartphones had been around for years (e.g. devices like the SE P800 and P900 series) before the iPhone, but these remained niche and required specially skinned websites for full functionality (XHTML and CSS stylesheets with `medium="handheld"`, which is now dead). It was really the iPhone's capability to render normal websites and to navigate them via pinch & zoom, which was considered the killer-app of the iPhone (esp. before there was an App Store with a wide variety of apps available.) The success of the iPhone was built on the much acclaimed multi-touch feature. And this is now, with responsive web-pages set to `meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"` as a standard, practically disabled and dead. (In other words, with a grain of salt, responsive killed multi-touch – or, at least, rendered it disposable.) (Moreover, I do not see any wide deployment of two or three finger gestures or similar multi-touch interaction on usual web-apps, especially, as these lack any standardization, but this may be just my own observation and anecdotal. That said, there's probably a niche use for virtual controllers for web games. But it's really the Mac trackpad and maybe the Magic Mouse, where multi-touch lives on with any significance.)

Sounds obvious now but pinch to zoom was a big new feature on iPhone that traditional phones, even those with touch capability, did not have muti-touch. Part of this was capacitive touch screen technology that few other devices had at the time, instead having cheaper resistive which pretty much required a stylus to do anything but press in a particular spot on screen. I don't believe android devices had muti-touch originally even though they had capacitive touch screens. Touchpads on laptops and touch screens added multi-touch years later.

dTal 6y ago
I don't think it was so much that resistive touchscreens were cheaper; rather, the dominant mobile interaction model had for a decade been oriented around styluses - handwriting recognition, small UI elements - and resistive touchscreens are simply more precise. Even with a capacitive screen, direct physical interaction such as smooth scrolling and pinch-zooming requires graphical horsepower that just wasn't on the table until around the time the iPhone came along.
salamandersauce 6y ago
Yeah. The T-Mobile G1 lacked multitouch gestures. You could hack them in though as the hardware supported it. I think it was a patent issue or someething which was why it was left out.

masswerk 6y ago

> What do you mean by that? Smartphones had been around for years (e.g. devices like the SE P800 and P900 series) before the iPhone, but these remained niche and required specially skinned websites for full functionality (XHTML and CSS stylesheets with `medium="handheld"`, which is now dead). It was really the iPhone's capability to render normal websites and to navigate them via pinch & zoom, which was considered the killer-app of the iPhone (esp. before there was an App Store with a wide variety of apps available.) The success of the iPhone was built on the much acclaimed multi-touch feature. And this is now, with responsive web-pages set to `meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"` as a standard, practically disabled and dead. (In other words, with a grain of salt, responsive killed multi-touch – or, at least, rendered it disposable.) (Moreover, I do not see any wide deployment of two or three finger gestures or similar multi-touch interaction on usual web-apps, especially, as these lack any standardization, but this may be just my own observation and anecdotal. That said, there's probably a niche use for virtual controllers for web games. But it's really the Mac trackpad and maybe the Magic Mouse, where multi-touch lives on with any significance.)