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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

I think you may be underestimating the impact of the touch screen. It's wasn't just that it was touch, it was the phone. I can't find it, but I remember reading industry reactions that were incredulous that it was even possible to have enough power to drive the screen for significant periods. That large touch screen really set the iPhone apart.

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You're probably thinking of a RIM employee who told a story about how the engineers thought Apple was lying about the iPhone because the large screen was too power-hungry:

The iPhone "couldn't do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life," Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time. "Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it."

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/12/27/rim.thought.ap...

Indeed I was. You found it a minute before me.

Seems doubtful that people would be incredulous over driving the screen; capacitive touchpads of the time didn't take much power. Color iPAQs from 8 years earlier managed a few hours with a CCFL backlight--white LEDs weren't widely available back then, and lithium-ion batteries of 1999 sucked.

If iPhone guts powering a windows phone with a resistive screen came out before iPhone, it wouldn't have sold like crazy. Windows phone software had a start menu... the fastest text input was drawing misunderstood letters with a stylus, resistive screens had to be manually calibrated and were very inaccurate unless using a stylus; iphone-like typing just didn't work.

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