Jobs understood that stylus was a psychological barrier, additional interface between user and screen.
Direct touch gave the biofeedback needed to make operating the device personal. Your touch makes things happen, rather than you touching it with an 8 inch pole.
It seems an irrelevant detail to a logical mind but this was key element to iPhone's success.
There is this good PBS documentary on psychology of marketing. If you don't have the time for the whole thing, fast forward to 0:48 and watch for one minute—it is very representative of the marketing mindset I am talking about.
I'm a grad student in math. If I'm taking notes for a class, I prefer to have my laptop and LaTeX the notes on the fly.
If I'm working on my research, I find working with pen and paper is a psychological help: it's a good interface for working on math. The only problem is that pen and paper is a bad system generally, for a couple of reasons:
1) most of the notes ends up being crap/scratch work, it'd be really nice to be able to copy and paste the good stuff out easily.
2) Paper is heavy, I always have to decide which of my notes to carry around.
3) It's easy to loose your notes.
I'd love to have a tablet with a stylus good enough to write mathematics with.
Direct touch gave the biofeedback needed to make operating the device personal. Your touch makes things happen, rather than you touching it with an 8 inch pole.
It seems an irrelevant detail to a logical mind but this was key element to iPhone's success.
There is this good PBS documentary on psychology of marketing. If you don't have the time for the whole thing, fast forward to 0:48 and watch for one minute—it is very representative of the marketing mindset I am talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahw5ODR2Sgs