> Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll).
Like almost all new products later thought of as 'visionary' innovations, the first iPhone built on pre-existing ideas but integrated them particularly well and added some excellent new refinements. It's easy to forget that the prior five years had been a crucible of in-market experimentation between companies like Nokia, Palm, HP, Sony, Ericsson and Blackberry with platforms like Pocket PC, Palm OS, Windows CE and Windows Mobile.
The iPhone was announced in Jan 2007 at MacWorld (and shipped in July), I was there and played with it extensively in the Apple booth. I remember thinking it had some especially clever ideas and was a very nice implementation. It advanced the "premium pocket phone" bar up to a new level but I didn't see it as unusually visionary. It was definitely significant but still a (large) step in an ongoing progression of refinement, integration and search for product/market fit. There were already large color touchscreen devices which integrated a phone, messaging, camera, music player, Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS. Here's an article looking at a few pre-iPhone devices: https://www.phonearena.com/news/6-great-smartphones-from-10-....
The iPhone 1's design was uniquely simple and svelte but I was immediately concerned about it having enough battery to support that screen. The choice to go with just "One Big Button" and no physical keyboard or navigation keys was bold, weird and also a bit concerning. The on-screen keyboard-only and gesture nav-only choices did feel a bit like two steps forward, one back in iOS 1. It felt like they made a 'purist' design decision and had to make it work as well as it could. That worked out to be "well enough" but sometimes similarly bold but risky choices can fail when they sacrifice too much. However, the battery life did become a very serious issue for active users when the first iPhone shipped and limited the success of the device. It's also worth remembering the usability of iOS 1 was pretty clunky. I played with most of these early phone devices and owned several but didn't adopt an iPhone as my primary device until the iPhone 3G shipped 18 months after the iPhone launch. The 3G was significantly better, different and more refined than the iPhone 1.