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Multitouch was inevitable and demonstrated long before the iPhone. Mobile browsers existed long before the iPhone. What the iPhone did was have enough juice to

Multitouch was inevitable and demonstrated long before the iPhone. Mobile browsers existed long before the iPhone. What the iPhone did was have enough juice to run a real browser correctly. They did a good job on mobile Safari, but this is not a mind boggling invention. App Stores? Are you kidding? I had app stores on my smart phones for years. Yeah they sucked, but Apple didn't invent it, they just made it better. Inertial scrolling, yeah, that's a good call, and the only one you mentioned that's a legitimate invention.

arn 15y ago
I'm not so sure multi-touch was inevitable. I mean, as a general concept perhaps. But the trend for phone during the time that the iPhone was released was tiny-keyboards. It was the Blackberry era. It's no accident that 2006 era Android protoypes looked like Blackberrys. Jobs made a point that they were going to do away with that, and go full screen multitouch. It wasn't obvious and there were a lot of skeptics about giving up a physical keyboard. Typing on a screen just hadn't been done sucessfully. You say this is obvious now, but what phone did you own in early 2007? I had a Palm Treo.... with a keyboard.
- jarek 15y ago
  > It was the Blackberry era. In North America.
- homosaur 15y ago
  HTC Dash. A horrible phone. I guess when I mean multitouch was inevitable, I meant as a technology and not necessarily on the phone. Yes, Apple did perfect that technology first, but I saw demos of multitouch on tablet-like devices years before the iPhone. There were no commercial products that I can recall, but they were working prototypes and not just demos.
scrolls_of 15y ago
> Inertial scrolling, yeah, that's a good call, and the only one you mentioned that's a legitimate invention. Actually this was used in games long before the iPhone, including 3D games and 2D scrolling games. It might even have been one of the toy hacks for X11 or Windows. Here's a mention from 2001: http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=350 http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=350 Here's an IBM patent, filed 1997, for an "intertial slider": http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=uugAAAAAEBAJ http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=uugAAAAAEBAJ Multi-Touch goes back to 1985 at least: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/02/07/24/1615259/building-a-pressure-sensitive-multi-point-touchscreen http://ask.slashdot.org/story/02/07/24/1615259/building-a-pr...
vacri 15y ago
Inertial scrolling existed in Windows XP.
- homosaur 15y ago
  Where? Maybe I never noticed simply because I was using a mouse.

arn 15y ago

I'm not so sure multi-touch was inevitable. I mean, as a general concept perhaps. But the trend for phone during the time that the iPhone was released was tiny-keyboards. It was the Blackberry era. It's no accident that 2006 era Android protoypes looked like Blackberrys. Jobs made a point that they were going to do away with that, and go full screen multitouch. It wasn't obvious and there were a lot of skeptics about giving up a physical keyboard. Typing on a screen just hadn't been done sucessfully. You say this is obvious now, but what phone did you own in early 2007? I had a Palm Treo.... with a keyboard.

jarek 15y ago
> It was the Blackberry era. In North America.
homosaur 15y ago
HTC Dash. A horrible phone. I guess when I mean multitouch was inevitable, I meant as a technology and not necessarily on the phone. Yes, Apple did perfect that technology first, but I saw demos of multitouch on tablet-like devices years before the iPhone. There were no commercial products that I can recall, but they were working prototypes and not just demos.

scrolls_of 15y ago

> Inertial scrolling, yeah, that's a good call, and the only one you mentioned that's a legitimate invention. Actually this was used in games long before the iPhone, including 3D games and 2D scrolling games. It might even have been one of the toy hacks for X11 or Windows. Here's a mention from 2001: http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=350 http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=350 Here's an IBM patent, filed 1997, for an "intertial slider": http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=uugAAAAAEBAJ http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=uugAAAAAEBAJ Multi-Touch goes back to 1985 at least: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/02/07/24/1615259/building-a-pressure-sensitive-multi-point-touchscreen http://ask.slashdot.org/story/02/07/24/1615259/building-a-pr...

vacri 15y ago

Inertial scrolling existed in Windows XP.

homosaur 15y ago
Where? Maybe I never noticed simply because I was using a mouse.