I used my fingers on my Palm Pilot because it was more practical than dragging the stylus out. It wasn't using fingers per se that was revolutionary with the iPhone but that it packaged everything up in a package that was actually attractive to "normal people" instead of only appealing to gadget geeks and power users the way things like Palm devices did.
> I used my fingers on my Palm Pilot because it was more practical than dragging the stylus out.
Still using it in the same way as a mouse. The thing that set the iOS UI apart is direct manipulation of the UI. E.g. instead of using a scrollbar/arrows to scroll, you use your finger to move the page around. Instead of clicking a checkbox you move a slider. Instead of clicking a "zoom in" button you 'stretch' the photo out using your fingers. etc.
That might be true for some interactions, but you touched icons, buttons etc., and frankly I don't think that part would have made that much of a difference for users.
It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.
> I don't think that part would have made that much of a difference for users
I do. I think it was a revolutionary improvement. It's so much more intuitive to use, it's the one thing that makes your grandma able to use an iPad. It's hard to overstate how important this was. The fact that now you know about it, it seems obvious and not a big deal emphasises how big of an improvement it was.
> It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.
Of course not, it wasn't invented yet so they didn't know the Palm Pilot lacked this.
> Of course not, it wasn't invented yet so they didn't know the Palm Pilot lacked this.
You miss the point: Most people rejected the Palm Pilot before seeing how you interacted with it at all. The idea that how you interact with the device makes such a big difference is flawed to a large extent because these devices demonstrated quite clearly that there were other issues that stopped mass market adoption of these devices before people even bothered to figure out how you actually interacted with them.
