A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 26th Aug 2012 10:28 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless In light of the jury verdict in Apple vs. Samsung, the one-liners and jokes flew back and forth. One in particular, by Dan Frakes, has been copied and pasted all over the web, and it goes like this: "When the iPhone debuted, it was widely criticized for having no buttons/keys. Now people think the iPhone's design is 'obvious'." 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.
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RE[2]: Problem
by Thom_Holwerda on Tue 28th Aug 2012 09:22 UTC in reply to "RE: Problem"
Thom_Holwerda
Member since:
2005-06-29

The fun part: I actually HAVE a Newton. It uses a UI paradigm (notebook paradigm) which was short-lived and died out quickly in favour of Palm's application-centric UI, which iOS, Android, and everybody else in the mobile space copied 1:1.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[3]: Problem
by zima on Thu 30th Aug 2012 01:07 in reply to "RE[2]: Problem"
zima Member since:
2005-07-06

BTW Newton and pointing out ~contemporary early PDAs, like the Tandy Zoomer - I stumbled recently on another that might be also worth mentioning. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad#1990s

In 1993 [...] Amstrad released the PenPad, a PDA similar to the Apple Newton, and released only weeks before it. It was a commercial failure, and had several technical and usability problems. It lacked most features that the Apple Newton included, but had a lower price at $450.

Now, it was apparently a quite horrible device (links in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPad particularly the video review) ...but then, all of those very early models were more or less horrible (starting with the basic idea of handwriting recognition - WE can hardly read even our OWN handwriting, NVM from other people)

PS. WRT to one bit of your article...

This was a very common scenario for me on my beloved iPaq: I'd be watching a Futurama episode on my iPaq [...] when an email arrived. I could pause the video, switch to my email client, read the email, and go to the link mentioned therein. [...] I could write and send a reply, and go back to watching the video where I left off.

And I'm not entirely convinced it's a good thing... ;) (interruptions, stealing focus, and so on; still, I can't help also doing the same thing)

Edited 2012-08-30 01:11 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2