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
#2"Just to drive the point home: a device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious.."
I still don't buy it. This still misses the mark - it wasn't about a 'few' buttons, the iPhone was about none. All those pda's in the picture don't really mean anything to me. Sure, some of them had cell networking and a lot (most? all?) had wifi. But I would never consider the old pda's a mobile device. 'Mobile' to me comes from the term 'mobile phone', not 'mobile pda'.
To me, this article is typical of OSNews - if it's not Linux or open source, it bad/wrong/etc.
Anyway, Dan Frakes tweet wasn't talking about 'a few buttons being obvious' he said 'having no buttons/keys'. And like he said, if this was so obvious, then why wasn't everyone doing it in 2006? Howcome pda's didn't do this in the early 2000's? Because it took a visionary team of designers and execs (or just Jobs) that appreciates minimalism. No one at Compaq, HP, Microsoft's many pda OEMs would, no, could have done something like this. And don't forget the require stylus..
Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious
#3Well, no. You can look at an LCD monitor and say "look, prior art for a tablet" but that doesn't meet the legal meaning and requirements, and nor does this for the purposes of this case. Stop making the argument about Apple vs Google. This is about patents and commercialism. So many fan comments we can't see the forest through the trees.
Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious
#4Why are PDAs suddenly that weird uncle you never talk about and only see at birthdays?
Because they ultimately failed in the market. There was a reason that the Blackberry and Treo type devices became popular. They worked better than the early touchscreen devices.
Those early deficiencies left manufacturers gunshy about creating more touchscreen devices. It was combination of hardware issues (resistive, single touch) and also software (graffiti, interface).
It was not obvious in 2007 that such a device (full touchscreen, no physical keyboard) would succeed. The early iPhone reviews specifically addressed the keyboard issue, since this was a Blackberry world. Practically all Blackberry fans at the time were saying that the device would fail because you need a physical keyboard.
(2007) http://allthingsd.com/20070626/the-iphone-is-breakthrough-ha...
The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.
Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious
#5As someone who has owned a pre-iPhone phone with a touchscreen, and seen another one in the hand of a friend, no, what made the iPhone the iPhone is NOT obvious.
For the love of god, my LG Prada was so shitty I had to hit a 2px scrollbar with my thumb to scroll in the contact list. I can't contain the nervous laugh whenever some ignorant who never touched the device link to wikipedia proud of their attempt at mocking Apple. Web browsing on a touchscreen is a real PITA without something like the double tap making a paragraph fit the whole screen automatically too.
Like it or not but the iPhone, as a whole package, without just singling out a feature here and there, was a real innovation, a breath of fresh air that opened a new market and has been copied to death by some companies like Samsung. I hated my LG Prada but instantly loved my iPhone the day I bought one and I wasn't anything like an Apple fanboy.
Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious
#6>This is a very common trend in this entire debate that saddens me to no end: the iPhone is being compared to simple feature phones, while in fact, it should be compared to its true predecessor: the PDA. PDAs have always done with few buttons.
So,
1) having "few" buttons + stylus 2) in a different product category 3) in devices that very few people bought or cared about, means, in Thom's reasoning, that the iPhone was obvious.
Meanwhile, let's see the OSNEWS first review of the device, back in the day: (...) And it's innovative too. Everything seems to work via multi-touch, a touchscreen-based input method (...)
Searching for the review, I found this gem:
>This may seem like a bold statement. Apple's just released iPhone is not only very attractive as we would expect from an Apple product, but includes some impressive features and specifications. It's probably unrealistic to claim that anything currently available on the market competes with this offering. However, is it really a revolution in mobile communication devices? Maybe not if there still is something that can overshadow it, and do it very soon.
The thing that would overshadow the iPhone "very soon" was OpenMoko.
Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious
#7It's interesting that all of the devices that are pictured are turned off.
I remember using PDAs back in the day, and they tended to be fiddly affairs with styluses. Sure, you could use touch inputs, but touch input tended to be quite impractical, as the OS on the phone invariably tended to be a modified version of a desktop OS. [1]
Ever since the mobile phone was invented, there has been experimentation with form factors. Not all PDAs looked like iPaq's or XDA's. Nokia's Communicator [2] had an iPhone esque interface, but Nokia didn't consider making it touchscreen until well after the release of the iPhone.
Surely Apple's innovation - and the one which Samsung has copied - is combining the grid-based icon system (making tap targets much larger), with the few-button-large screen form factor. Because I don't remember PDAs being anywhere near as useful or usable as an iPhone.
[1] http://www.uspree.com/reviews/images/stories/hp-ipaq-214-ent... [2] http://cdn101.iofferphoto.com/img3/item/116/916/389/nokia-e9...
Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious
#8"Just to drive the point home: a device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious.." I still don't buy it. This still misses the mark - it wasn't about a 'few' buttons, the iPhone was about none. All those pda's in the picture don't really mean anything to me. Sure, some of them had cell networking and a lot (most? all?) had wifi. But I would never consider the old pda's a mobile device. 'Mobile' to me comes fro…
> it wasn't about a 'few' buttons, the iPhone was about none.
Excuse me? Last I checked, the iPhone has at least three buttons, maybe four! Home, Volume Down, Volume Up, Power.
Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious
#9"Just to drive the point home: a device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious.." I still don't buy it. This still misses the mark - it wasn't about a 'few' buttons, the iPhone was about none. All those pda's in the picture don't really mean anything to me. Sure, some of them had cell networking and a lot (most? all?) had wifi. But I would never consider the old pda's a mobile device. 'Mobile' to me comes fro…
So what's the innovation here? Applying minimalism (an established style from the 60's) to computers and phones?
Is that really worthy of patent protection? Asked another way, should I be granted a patent to apply minimalism to other objects all around me? Suitcases? Refrigerators? Etc?
Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious
#10One of the big differences as far as PDAs go is that they required a stylus, and the touch was pressure sensitive. It couldn't be used just with your fingers.
The iPhone's touchscreen implementation was innovative. I remember quite a lot of debate in the period between the iPhone's announcement and release about weather or not a capacitive touchscreen on a phone would provide a terrible experience. There were a lot of very smart people out there who thought it just wouldn't work (greasy fingerprints came up a lot). At the time, for Apple, putting this kind of UX out there was a huge risk, and a major innovation in the industry. They really nailed it, and in hindsight it, like many other great innovations, seems obvious, but at the time it was far from it.
EDIT - here's a quote from a CNET article at the time: "11. Just how useful is the touch screen? The iPhone user interface looks elegant, innovative, and easy-to-use, but is it the best interface for a device like this? Whenever you do anything, the iPhone will command your full visual attention. "No buttons" may be sexy, but it also means you can't do anything without looking at the phone. The iPhone's iPod usability may suffer even worse from the touch screen. Have you ever tried to operate an iPod while it's in your pocket? You can do it, but it's hard. The iPhone will make blind iPod-surfing downright impossible. That said, it looks like the iPhone will eliminate accidental pocket-dialing once and for all."