As someone that was a daily iPAQ user with it Bluetooth tethered to my phone, they aren't even comparable.

The browser on the iPhone was actually good for the time. Touch actually worked, the display was responsive, they OSK was quite fast, and the lack of copy/paste was just dumb.

I ditched the iPAQ as soon as I held the iPhone and used it for five minutes.

I remember CRT touchscreens being used as cash registers in the late 90s. It's true, touch was nothing new. What was new was the combination of capacitive touch and a slick responsive UI. Previous systems had unresponsive GUIs or inferior touchscreen technology like resistive, IR or lightpen.

Getting both right at the same time was the big first for the iphone, not the bare concept of touchscreens as input devices.

What both you and grandparent are missing is the biggest iPhone touch innovation of all: multitouch. Multitouch was invented largely by a one-person startup that Apple purchased, and the iPhone became the first device to mass-produce it. The book The One Device covers its development well: https://amzn.to/2lrbKA7

IMHO multi-touch is really overrated in significance. The only multi finger gesture I use is pinch zoom and it’s like once a week. If that was a widget or triple tapping or something, I wouldnt notice.

The improvements to touch that made it magical was the super responsive typing and momentum scrolling and it’s all just one fingered.

Super responsive typing actually does depend on multitouch, because if you type fast then you will have multiple fingers touching different keys at the same time.

It's a stretch to call that multi-touch. The key press events are still a serialised stream of single finger touches. When people have spoken about multi-touch features and patents they have invariably been referring to chords and gestures.

From the app standpoint it is, but not from the actual implementation algorithm.

I owned a fingerworks keyboard in 2003. The multi touch and gestures were amazing. And it was physically painful to type on. Try touch typing on a solid surface for any length of time. Fingertip bruises are no fun. The company mysteriously vanished shortly after announcing an after market multitouch keyboard for the iBook...

That's the company that was purchased by Apple, as described in the book I linked to above.

Touch interfaces were not widely used on much of anything prior to the mid 2000's. Yes there were exceptions, but it wasn't really used for general computing.

Seeing that I was programming ruggedized Windows CE based devices before the iPhone came out, I didn’t forget anything. But, the generally consumer market didn’t use Windows CE devices and Windows CE wasn’t exactly the definition of user friendly mobile design.

This is just like the initial reaction to the iPod on Slashdot back in 2001. “less space than the Nomad. No wireless. Lame” and why computer geeks don’t get the general consumer.