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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I remember 2 audience reactions really, really clearly from the original iPhone launch:

1. the reactions to "flick to scroll".

2. reaction to pinch-to-zoom.

In both cases the audience was just gobsmacked: oohs, ahs and cheers all around.

For people saying there were other devices out there at the time with similar or better hardware specs, or even comparable feature sets, I think you are totally missing the point. That kind of comparison is making the same mistake as the infamous "Less space than a Nomad. Lame" Slashdot comment re the iPod. I remember trying out the original iPhone the second day it was on sale, and just being blown away - and I worked in the mobile industry at the time and was well aware of the features of other phones.

The overall experience of the iPhone was just legions ahead of anything else that existed at that time.

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Yes, there were already phones with touchscreens before the iPhone, but they were all using a stylus, which seemed a better choice than a finger at the time, since they were more precise. But after the iPhone came out, it quickly became obvious how much better it was to use a screen with a finger with multi-touch than with a stylus. Steve or whoever made the decisions about the iPhone obviously knew very well what they were going for and 100% deserve the success.

Those stylus touchscreen phones had a 640x480 or an 800x600 resolution and a full web browser. They could use basically any web site on the internet.

The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version.

I figured that access to the entire web was a killer feature that would let the clunkier stylus phones compete successfully with an iPhone. Not a prediction that aged well.

> The first iPhone had a 320x480 screen and could only use web sites that had a mobile version.

That's just totally wrong. In fact, IIRC the original iPhone announcement showed a visit to the NY Times website to show how you could scroll around and zoom "full screen" websites.

If anything, the ability to navigate "desktop" sites on the iPhone was much better than other phones because those other versions of "full web browser" were clunky incarnations that made it difficult to zoom in and scroll around. It was pinch and double tap to zoom, and finger-on-screen to scroll that made browsing sites on the "normal" web much better than anything else at the time.

Didn't the iPhone OS also pioneer zooming in to website elements? I.e. double tapping on for instance the content of an article would zoom to the size of the div holding that content.

I think that feature made a huge impact on usability of desktop websites on the iPhone.

> Yes, there were already phones

> with touchscreens before the iPhone,

> but they were all using a stylus

The LG Prada was the first capacitive touchscreen phone and was on sale before the iPhone. Technically its specs were underwhelming, but it was the pioneer of finger-UI.

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