alt Hacker NewsIt was really the touch screen UI, which was brought to market by Apple. Always been curious if it was developed there or if like the desktop windowed UI it was pioneered elsewhere.
Prior efforts were menu oriented or attempts at desktop UI on a tiny screen, like WinCE.
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NikolaNovak • today at 11:51 AM
The basics of PalmOS were fairly touch oriented but resistive rather than capacitive, which made a difference usability wise. Menus though could get desktop-y.
I think the big diff was assumption of handwriting as the UI. Latter palm treo had a keyboard like blackberry, I used several generations of those before trying the HTC g1 :).
There was a whole generation of touch focused devices around '99-'03 or so, mostly hampered by too slow hardware, too low resolutions, cost, awful battery life and awful capacitative touch.
I worked on a Linux based tablet back in '99, that had all of those flaws.
Apples biggest innovation was recognising when the hardware had caught up enough to make this attractive to normal consumers.
That's not a small thing - the entire rest of the industry tried,failed, and wrongly assumed the failure meant the concept was a dead end and mostly abandoned it, before Apple resurrected it.