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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

As a long time palm user, nothing about the iPhone seemed particularly new to me. The interface was almost identical, the form factor was almost identical.

The only real upgrades were a cellular modem and a little bit prettier case.

Saying apple "invented" modern smartphones is a bit like saying Tesla invented electric cars. No they didn't, they just made a really good one that is very popular.

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The capacitive multi-touch screen was definitely new.

honestly i think that was the biggest reason for its success. Blackberry was already a thing, but that big honking, clunky keyboard was just silly on a phone, and meant you had an exceptionally little amount of screen real estate. The developments in capacitive touch made a lot of room for other improvements to handheld devices.

I agree. I liked Palm OS back in the day and used to have two generations of Sony Clié PDAs with resistive touchscreens. The first one (an SL10) had a grayscale square touchscreen and a little "Graffiti" area below it where you could jot down simplified characters and some gestures. The second one (TG50) was really neat. It had a color screen (I remember watching videos and playing ScummVM Lucas Arts adventures on this in 2003 or 2004!) and it replaced the Graffiti area with an actual hardware keyboard. Text entry worked so much better than it used to with that pseudo-handwriting recognition.

Much later, when I saw Apple and Android smartphones, I could not understand how anybody could stand the onscreen keyboards. But the truth is that the multitouch hardware allowed to progress these systems far enough that they would surpass earlier tiny physical keyboards.

I had a Treo before my iPhone. The iPhone added a far superior user experience, and with the iPhone 3G, a cellular network arrived that was fast enough to be actually useful. Most of all Apple's App Store and iTunes' licensing offered expandability, media, and services that Palm could only dream of.

Apple's chief invention wasn't hardware. It was Apple's digital infrastructure that made the iPhone intoxicatingly can't-live-without-it. (Unfortunately the SciAm article missed this completely.)

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