121–130 of 182 posts
* Commodore Amiga
* Psion PDAs
* Nokia N900
* Motion Computing Tablets (yeah, almost 10 years before the iPhone)
All four were pretty good tech - you could argue that the N900 and Motion Computing devices really needed capacitive touch, but all four ended up in history's dustbin because of business issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was no shock when iPhone was launched. Nokia had tried touch display phones already by that time and they had gone the way of N900 and deemed unviable. Disarray yes, but not because of iPhone. Of course there were people that appreciated the threat that iPhone might become, but if anything it was laughed at and ridiculed. I mean come on - no 3G and no QWERTY keyboard. Who in the world would use that! ;)
The N900 came two years after the iPhone, and Nokia's first touchscreen phone (the 5800) one year after the iPhone, though
Nokia knew they where about to get eaten by iPhone and Android phones, so they made a exit plan and sold to Microsoft. Microsoft didn't like open source so they replaced the OS with their proprietary Windows OS - one OS/platform on all devices (phone,tablet,desktop) was a novel idea, windows 8 was great on phones and tablets, but everyone hated the UI on desktop.
It's interesting now to think I had this with me 24/7 for months and it didn't change my life at all. Same with the Palm V I owned before it. All the exciting ideas were there in the zeitgeist (portable general purpose computer in my pocket! ubiquitous instant access to information!) but the technology couldn't realize them yet.
If you go back a little bit, there are a few devices that really were forks in the road for the industry. Probably the biggest, most important: * Commodore Amiga * Psion PDAs * Nokia N900 * Motion Computing Tablets (yeah, almost 10 years before the iPhone) All four were pretty good tech - you could argue that the N900 and Motion Computing devices really needed capacitive touch, but all four ended up in history's dust…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cut my teeth on GUI development with PyQT back in the day. I couldn't afford an N900 at the time, but was sorely tempted. Ironically the best mobile platform for hacking GUI and mobile apps in Python now is, er, iOS. Pythonista gives access to almost the entire iOS API suite (and slightly hacky access to all of it), even has a GUI builder built-in, and is highly programmable directly on the device. Pyto is pretty c…
You still cannot ship the resulting apps though. One has to hack around with the likes of Kivy to get that. On Maemo you could just ship a Deb (at least outside the braindead Nokia store, which was restricted to C++). The sad thing is, I remember attending a PyConUK about 10 years ago where this was a clear item in the keynote (by Van Lindberg, iirc): "the Python story on mobile is non-existent". Everybody agreed it…
There are non-python dev environments that enable the same thing, like Codea that uses Lua. It has several published apps and games out there on the App Store as well.
> the touch screen is resistive and requires a stylus. It does not require a stylus, and is superior to capacitive touchscreens in every way.
Are you still stuck in 2008? Perhaps worked at Nokia? I heard this a lot back then. Even believed it myself because how could 1000s of engineers be wrong... Ohh how nice those screens felt! Then again it required only a few seconds of iphone usage to realize what a lie it is. Even the first crappy android phones with capacitive touchscreens was enough to show this.
For capacitive screens you instead have to add another digitizer layer by wacom or n-trig to be able to draw, which took a while and still is not common enough. That said, bad quality resistive screens were much, much more frustrating to use than bad capacitive screen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Largely the same thing happened at Blackberry. Because the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive in the US, Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device, the BB Storm. It was released as a Verizon exclusive in late 2008, and coincided with the release of HTC/Tmobile G1, the first Android phone. BB tried to argue that BBOS6 was a click trackball based OS and would not transition to touch w…
I remember trying out a Storm. Webpage would render incredibly slowly because Blackberry weren't capable of putting a wifi chip in the handset (it was limited to edge if I recall). The whole UI was sluggish. Cherry on top? No apps. There was a way to write apps but it was pretty much a unique SDK per phone model. No app store of course. It hit the market a few months after Apple revealed the iPhone 3G and the App Sto…
But it did have apps. Just not many. I remember downloading Pandora, Shazam and Whatsapp from the Blackberry App store. Android and iOS stores obviously dwarfed it in terms of quantity though.
Source: my company's WiFi was 64 characters, and the one employee with an N900 couldn't connect :)