"No, Apple did not invent the touchscreen. But the iPhone... It was the first touchscreen device that mattered."

There you go.

Out of genuine curiosity, what touchscreen device would you say then was actually the first one that mattered?

I assume by "mattered" Gruber meant mass market popularity, which IMO was mostly because Apple did get many things right in their touchscreen. (I owned a bunch of touchscreen devices before my first iPhone and they all sucked from a user experience perspective - missed taps, sluggish response, lack of multitouch, requirement for a special stylus etc).

I'd say that Palm manufactured a large number of "touchscreen devices that mattered" years before the iPhone. Just because it wasn't high-resolution and capacitive doesn't change the fact that for a long while, Palm Pilots were a staple of business.

Ah, fair point. The Palm didn't come to my mind because I didn't buy one - I personally felt that the device & the stylus-based interface were too clunky - but you're right, it was still a touchscreen device that mattered.

I'd be interested to know which mainstream touchscreen device really impacted society before the iPhone.

Whether or not you like the iPhone, it's rather hard to claim that it didn't revolutionize the cell phone market.

Palm pilot was probably the first usable device.