I sort of agree about tactile feedback. People don't miss it much on the iphone. On the other hand, real buttons are still a far, far better interface. I basically don't use the virtual keyboard on my droid. I either use the real keyboard or voice search. Both interfaces blow the virtual keyboard away (and it's not even that bad). I guess what I'm saying is that both sides are right. Real buttons are better, but if you don't have them normal users will still buy the device.

I think the stroke of genius in the iPhone (and I fully admit this is obvious 3 years later), is that people want to do a wide variety of simple things on their phone.

If you are sending tons of emails from your phone, then yeah, the physical keyboard blows the onscreen one out of the water. But when you are running a dozen apps with completely different functionality, but all of them are fairly simplistic, a touch-screen (especially a good one) does a better job on average, as compared to a keyboard where you quickly descend into the buttons being meaningless ala Nokia endless 2-button menu navigation.

Now obviously you can have both (I bought a G1 back in '08 and I like having both), but it took balls for Apple to make that decision and say that a touchscreen only would be sufficient. However the impact of that decision on the elegance of the form factor is undeniable, and something that I imagine had a large if unmeasurable impact on the success of the iPhone. It's the type of thing that you need a product visionary at the top to achieve, otherwise it's DOA at the first board meeting.

I think it depends on the size of your hands and how you use it. I have big hands, and all physical keyboards sized for a phone are painful to use. Once I trained myself to ignore typos and let the iPhone correct them for me, I became far faster on the touchscreen than I ever was on a physical keyboard.

I don't find tactile feedback all that useful when you often hit the wrong key anyway due to their tiny size. I'd say my typing is as good on the iPhone as any keypad of equivalent size. Though the auto-correction probably makes it better in the end. It's not like you can really touch type on any phone sized keypad like you can with a real computer keyboard.

I don't want a touch screen on a point-and-shoot digital camera, for example.

Touch screens may turn into a technology that's omnipresent although "educated" consumers try to avoid it (like glossy laptop screens or high-megapixel cameras with tiny sensors)

It's not missed primarily because there's perfect visual feedback – when you scroll, the screen scrolls immediately (even if you reached the edge, it still scrolls a bit), when you type you see the letters popping up exactly at the point you're looking at, etc.

Exactly. My iPad hung a little yesterday and didn't do anything when I hit a button. I had, in fact, pressed the button, but there was no visual feedback. It's startling when it's not perfect, but when it works just so it doesn't really matter that it's not tactile feedback, it's that your brain gets the message that "yes, I just did x-action"

My iPhone 3G nowadays basically takes guesswork to function. "I pressed this link four times, is it frozen or did I touch the wrong place?"

This is why I always immediately disable the trackpad clicks on laptops and netbooks. There's no tactile response, and due to the delay in Windows (it's as inevitable as the sun setting) I find myself opening a document 5 times whilst trying to figure out if I even double clicked it once.

I've used iPhones and Touches, yet to get hold of an iPad but this definitely hasn't been my response. It generally reacts fast enough to not need tactile response. Generally. I suppose when it goes wrong it's disastrously annoying for end-user experience.

It's amazing how much slower my 3G has gotten in the past 6 or 9 months.

What's surprising is that it's gotten so much slower without any new functionality! I'm convinced that Apple has added some code to slow it down just to get me to buy a new one tinfoil hat.

iOS 4 on the 3G seems almost unusable and with little additional features I wonder why Apple bothered with it. There are downgrade tutorials around I'd suggest looking at them.

Supposedly, iOS 4.1 that just came out is MUCH faster on 3G. http://lifehacker.com/5628991/iphone-3g-speed-test-ios-40-ve...

Hmm, the article says marginal to large, and it looks like it's still much slower than 3, which is already a dog... Too bad...