Reply To: Apple iphones are overpriced aluminum.

I did some research about touch screens before 2007.

There were Multi Touch screens before the iPhone, and there were handheld devices that didn’t have a keyboard where the screen was the primary input, although they usually used a stylus(not all, but most). Typing with a stylus is pretty slow though.

As far as I know the first real multi touch screen is from 1984, which could respond to multiple finger inputs. And in 1985 the pinch-to-zoom gesture was demonstrated.

There was the Lemur Input Device which was relesed in 2005 and had 10 finger multi-touch. It was the first commercial product to feature a proprietary transparent multi-touch screen. As far as I know, it worked just as good as the iPhone screen, you didn’t have to press hard on it to work or anything.

The iPhone touch screen was from a company called FingerWorks purchased by Apple in 2005.