> It's curious how innovative Apple was with the iPhone, and how
> successful those ideas were.

In reality the touch screen and LCD suppliers were heavily pushing the 
idea of a phone with a huge high resolution screen and no keyboard for a 
long time before the iPhone (for obvious reasons), but nobody was 
interested. Apple was the first company to realise that actually they 
could make a really successful product with this technology.

> The iPhone might not have been the first portable device with a
> touch-screen (usable with fingers rather than a stylus) in history,
> but it was very certainly the first one produced for the masses.
> When Apple announced this, many people doubted its usability, and many
> even laughed at it (a common criticism being "it doesn't even have a
> keyboard".)

This is exactly the reasoning Nokia refused to go with such a design. 
They almost managed it a few times but continued to demand a slide-out 
hidden keyboard somewhere which just made the phone really chunky.

> But Apple did everything just right: Rather than going with a cheap,
> low-resolution touch-screen on a device that can be used for 2 hours,
> they really invested in it and put a really, really high-quality, accurate
> and responsive touch screen with a very decent pixel resolution (at least
> at that time) that keeps working properly no matter how dirty the screen
> gets, and they put a lot of effort on the software side to make it as
> usable as possible. And you can actually use the device for quite a long
> time without recharging.

The surprising thing is the physical resolution of the touch screen is 
extremely low, something like 13x7 (sometimes if you catch the screen at 
exactly the correct angle in the light you can see the pattern).  All 
the accuracy is in the touch controller circuits that can send clever 
signals to each row/column, measure the response and use interpolation 
to create a much higher accuracy value.

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