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A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

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Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#131

Post by ktizo »

nirvana wrote: post #86
corin_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the ability to put them together, it's about deciding what to put together, when to do it, how to market it and of course a big part: what software to put on it. I'd never say " all Apple do is" about this, just that it is what they do, and they do it better than anyone else.

Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.

Bespoke touch oriented UI systems have been around for a very long time, some of them surprisingly sophisticated and innovative. A mate of mine used to do interfaces for touchscreen information kiosks, for instance.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#132

Post by antidoh »

nirvana wrote: post #111
antidoh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them." Hmmm. I'm still using my Palm Centro phone, which used to be a Treo, which used to be a Palm PDA, which used to be a Palm Pilot. All of those have a touch oriented UI, and most if not all of them pre-date iPhone by years. So now I guess we can watch the debate about whether Newton or its competitors pre-date each other.

None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. Very different from a stylus which is only touching one or two pixels at a time. This is very easy to sense because the stylus pushes two layers together physically and effectively is closing swithces. A touch is much difeferent, a finger is an amorphous blob over many pixels of a varying shape, and Apple had to figure out how to resolve that into a sin…

My fingernail works just fine, and with much finer control than my blob of a finger on an aPhone or iPhone. Apple added some cool stuff, but I definitely interact with my Centro's screen by touch, with very little error.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#133

Post by slantyyz »

drumdance wrote: post #114
slantyyz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't even need to put a bunch of geniuses in a room together for an afternoon. All you would have to do is get a team to watch any episode of Star Trek:TNG and create something like the slates the Enterprise crew used. But the thing is, if the hardware components and UI skills existed, why wasn't anyone able to do it in the past? I think the answer is that on the manufacturer side, nobody cared about end-user…

I think it's even simpler. Only Apple had the supply chain to build an affordable device. Everyone else knew the outcome would be too expensive relative to the feature set. I love my iPad, but there's no way I would pay $1500 for it. It's just not that good. Only Apple could build one at a competitive cost.

>> Only Apple had the supply chain to build an affordable device

Don't disagree, but if you flash back to 2007, there was still a huge outcry over the "high" price of the iPhone.

People back then had forgotten that they had paid just as much for the first Razr.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#134

Post by antidoh »

nirvana wrote: post #111
antidoh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them." Hmmm. I'm still using my Palm Centro phone, which used to be a Treo, which used to be a Palm PDA, which used to be a Palm Pilot. All of those have a touch oriented UI, and most if not all of them pre-date iPhone by years. So now I guess we can watch the debate about whether Newton or its competitors pre-date each other.

None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. Very different from a stylus which is only touching one or two pixels at a time. This is very easy to sense because the stylus pushes two layers together physically and effectively is closing swithces. A touch is much difeferent, a finger is an amorphous blob over many pixels of a varying shape, and Apple had to figure out how to resolve that into a sin…

" And do you get off the hook for repeating this nonsense simply because it fits your anti-apple ideology?"

Ideology? It's just a phone.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#135

Post by gnaffle »

bornhuetter wrote: post #106
gnaffle wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the market was just waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become available, why did it take all the others years to come up with anything competitive after the iPhone launched? Why didn't they all have capacitive iPhone look-alikes ready in the lab then? Isn't it more reasonable to assume that the mobile market would have stayed roughly as it had the previous 10 years, with incremental improvements in screens, di…

> Why didn't they all have capacitive iPhone look-alikes ready in the lab then? The Samsung evidence showed that they did. Not as good as the iPhone, certainly, but they were obviously all thinking about it. > Apple ... should be credited with making the first usable, mass market touchscreen smartphone. I completely agree with this. But they don't deserve a monopoly on it. > Isn't it more reasonable to assume that th…

What evidence was presented that Samsung had a similar phone in the works in 2007? One with a capacitive touchscreen and a user interface optimized for finger touch?

For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it, but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future?

I didn't say the market wouldn't move. Of course it would, but probably with incremental improvements. Why? Because mobile user interfaces changed very little before the iPhone arrived.

All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus. Even new contenders like Maemo and Android were initially designed this way. Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually, but I think it's odd to think that the transition to all-display touchscreen phones would have happened at the exact same pace if the iPhone had not been introduced, and that Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#136

Post by pinaceae »

Ever notice how Jony Ive looks nothing like a Googler?

This whole trainwreck of a discussion is fed IMHO by the big rift between common, male IT-oriented folks and the rest of the population around visuals, aestethics and yes, concepts like fashion.

Sit in the cantina of any company and you can tell who is development/IT. Neckbeards? Socks in sandals? Leather cowboy hats? Attachments on their belts? Unshapely bodies?

Aestethics do exist in that other group. Good code, clever algorithms, etc. Fashion too, in forms of buzzwords and technologies du jour. DjangoRailsHadoop... But visual aestethics? Nope, nada, utter incomprehension.

The utter genious of Jobs was to bring the aestethics of the outer world into software and computer hardware. Design already existed in other industries, see Braun, Sony, etc but no one applied it to software. Because "nerds" didn't even understand it. See it. Grok it.

These Samsung vs Apple debates show this faultline. No comprehension at all why a particular implementation of multi touch should matter, be worth something. It is all obvious, just UI, the thing you slap on top of your awesome program. Why should it matter how it LOOKS?! How can that be so important? Didn't the LG Prada looks exactly the same? Ok, it used scrollbars, but why is that different to how iOS does it?

Whenever someone claims that Apple's success is just about marketing, nothing relevant in their products themselves. Whenever it's just off the shelf components they took and re-arranged, super simple and OBVIOUS, I can't help to think about blind people arguing about the uselessness of colors.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#137

Post by gnaffle »

seabee wrote: post #108
gnaffle wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the market was just waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become available, why did it take all the others years to come up with anything competitive after the iPhone launched? Why didn't they all have capacitive iPhone look-alikes ready in the lab then? Isn't it more reasonable to assume that the mobile market would have stayed roughly as it had the previous 10 years, with incremental improvements in screens, di…

Revisionist, much? The G1 came out a few months after the iPhone 3G, the first iPhone to support third-party apps.

So? The G1 launched in October 2008, over 1,5 years after the first iPhone, and it didn't even have multi-touch enabled.

So my question is still, why weren't competitors further along in utilizing capacitive touchscreens if these advancements were so obvious in 2006?

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#138

Post by GHFigs »

georgemcbay wrote: post #129
nirvana wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.

Microsoft developed the "old" Surface (now called PixelSense) at the same time Apple was working on the iPhone. Both were released in very early 2007 after years of R&D work. Both had multitouch UIs of the type you seem to think are so innovative. Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens (which neither MS nor Apple invented, mind you -- capacitive and m…

Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens

Strange conclusion, given that the original Microsoft Surface does not use a capacitive touchscreen.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#139

Post by corin_ »

GHFigs wrote: post #138
georgemcbay wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft developed the "old" Surface (now called PixelSense) at the same time Apple was working on the iPhone. Both were released in very early 2007 after years of R&D work. Both had multitouch UIs of the type you seem to think are so innovative. Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens (which neither MS nor Apple invented, mind you -- capacitive and m…

Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens Strange conclusion, given that the original Microsoft Surface does not use a capacitive touchscreen.

His parentheses made you miss the rest of his sentence.

> Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens (...) made such UIs an obvious next step to anyone paying attention to the field.

He was saying that capacitive was inspiration to both, not used by both.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#140

Post by jonknee »

sjwright wrote: post #33
jonknee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LG Prada pre-dates the iPhone and was actually the first phone to have a capacitive touch screen. It had as many buttons as the infringing Samsung devices ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada ). This was noticed at the time of the iPhone launch too: http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/11/iphone-and-lg-ke850-separ... This is all silly though, Apple wasn't making the argument based on Samsung making a touch based ph…

The LG Prada was a feature-phone with a nicer display. If Samsung had released the Prada in 2008, they would have been at zero risk from retaliation by Apple.

Feature phone or not (you have to compare it to the original iPhone which wasn't a smartphone either), it looked a lot like the iPhone. Apple didn't invent touch screen phones, they "just" made them popular. It's a big accomplishment, but they didn't create the segment.
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