3. Touchscreens

Before the debut of the iPhone, the smartphone world was dominated by Palm and BlackBerry handsets with small screens and plastic

keyboards. They were phones for business people, not everyday users, replete with styluses and focused on email.

Just before he unveiled the iPhone, Steve Jobs blasted these phones on-stage as hard to use and lacking in functionality. You were stuck with a large plastic keyboard whether you needed it or not. And if the manufacturers came up with a new function or idea after the product had launched? Too bad, you were stuck with that form factor.

Apple sought to remedy all of that with one simple solution – a touchscreen.

Superior screen

The iPhone launched with a mediocre 2MP camera, no third-party apps and only 2G. It couldn’t record video, and you couldn’t search your emails. But all that was made irrelevant by the capacitive touchscreen.

The lack of a physical keyboard made reading on the iPhone a far superior experience, with more screen space devoted to the subject matter. Touch functions could change depending on use, with play/pause buttons when listening to music or a keyboard in Messages, all of which would disappear when not in use.

MacFormat editor Graham Barlow remembers being amazed when he first saw the touchscreen. “My abiding memory of the iPhone launch is of Steve Jobs zooming into a web page in Safari with an unpinch gesture. There were audible gasps from the audience – we’d never seen anything like it before,” he says.

Having such a large display area made it ideal for viewing things in landscape orientation as well as portrait – so Apple built in an accelerometer for this purpose. In fact, it was so good that Google completely shelved its own smartphone plans and started over again when its executives saw the iPhone launch. Google was originally going after Microsoft with a phone that had a physical keyboard and no touchscreen. But after seeing Jobs unveil Apple’s revolutionary phone, Google knew its own product simply wouldn’t be good enough.

“As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately,” remembers Google engineer Chris De Salvo. “What we had suddenly looked just so… ’90s.”

The touchscreen transformed phones from communication devices into immersive media viewers. Instagram, YouTube, Twitter – it’s a good bet that none of these would have taken off in the way that they did if the touchscreen hadn’t have been introduced. Apple didn’t mean for that to happen – at least not directly – but it all came about as a result of that

design decision.