alt Hacker NewsResistive touchscreens get a lot of criticism but even back then that was partly down to Apple propaganda which caught on because people were used to cheap screens with rubbish resistive sensors. The touchscreen on the N900 was good: high resolution, rigid, fast, accurate, sensitive enough for fingertip use.
Replies
tverbeure • today at 11:20 AM
Did it have multi-touch?
Propaganda or not, I still remember the sense of wonder when first experiencing the smooth zooming and panning with two fingers on the first iPhone. Adding multi-touch to the 2007 MacBook trackpad was one of the reasons why I switched to OSX too.
(I still have that phone and when I try it today, smooth is not what I’d call it.)
mjg59 • today at 10:04 AM
And no multitouch.
Resistive touchscreens get a lot of criticism, and all of it is deserved.
Apple has, correctly, recognized that for a touch-first UI, a resistive touchscreen will always feel worse, wear out worse and perform worse than a glass-integrated capacitive touchscreen. This was a big part of how they got their touch-optimized UI to work and feel this good - which was how they differentiated the first iPhone from the sea of contemporary PDAs.
Nokia sticking with the most half-assed touch UI adaptations, Nokia sticking with resistive tech - all of is symptomatic of Nokia either not understanding what Apple's edge was, or being too slow to react to it.