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I worked on devices that didn't need styluses 6 years before the iPhone. They were not unusual at all. What kept people using styluses was that resistive touch
by vidarh 3y ago
I worked on devices that didn't need styluses 6 years before the iPhone. They were not unusual at all. What kept people using styluses was that resistive touch is shit and imprecise, and on small screens they were awful to use.
So this boils down to capacitative touch of sufficient quality having gotten cheap enough.
- nottorp 3y agoDid they offer finger scrolling? PalmOS basically didn't, just because the scroll bars were too thin.
- vidarh 3y agoNot gestures, but pulling on scroll bars was certainly a thing. Gestures were definitely an improvement, but pretty much not something you want to try on a bad quality small resistive screen unless you want the user to throw their device at the wall in frustration. The funny thing is with number of those kinds of early devices I had for use or testing, they all seemed awesome at the time, but I know I probably shouldn't ever pick any of them up again, because I know logically that the experience would be awful given what I know about the tech and compared to current iterations of the same tech... It's funny how memory works. I still wish for the reality where having a pure-unadulterated Linux installation on a tablet that early remained a thing, though - the current locked-down tablet ecosystems in many ways (but not the hardware!) still feels like a big step back in many respects.