How times change. From Google’s Android specification documents in May of 2007 (several months after the iPhone’s announcement):
Google in 2007: ‘a touchscreen cannot completely replace physical buttons’
3.11.2 Touchscreen
Touchscreens will be supported. However, the Product was designed with the presence of discrete physical buttons as an assumption, therefore a touchscreen cannot completely replace physical buttons.
By the time the T-Mobile G1 was released in late 2008, touchscreen support had moved from an afterthought to a central element of Android — and indeed, the smartphone market as a whole. With the addition of a soft keyboard in Android 1.5, the transition to a touch-focused platform was complete.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
Most Popular
Most Popular
- Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body ultrasound scans
- Apple’s weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness
- Tim Cook says RAM expenses are ‘unsustainable’ and Apple is going to raise prices
- This Ghost in the Shell keyboard makes me want to activate the hundred spidery robot fingers inside my regular fingers
- Amazon employees say they’re facing termination for backing data center limits
