revealed about a month prior to the iPhone... shipped a few weeks before the iPhone...
If only the cause-and-effect were so clear. The iPhone was rumored for years before it was released; it was surely in manufacturing prototype for many months before it was announced, and then it was announced months before it actually shipped.
Apple is legendary for keeping its secrets well. But even major government agencies can't keep secrets perfectly. Espionage works. And I'm sure that lots of people in China were in a position to figure out Apple's plans in advance. (Note how poorly the iPad's secrets were kept relative to the iPhone. The biggest advantage Apple had with the iPod and iPhone was the element of surprise: Nobody thought of Apple as a music-player company, or a telephony company, so nobody was focusing too hard on Apple product espionage. They're focused now, though.)
So the argument that these various contemporaneous iPhone-like devices would have happened without the iPhone is pretty weak. For example, just because Google and Microsoft announced iPad knockoffs within days of the iPad announcement [1] doesn't mean that those products [2] were going to happen with or without Apple.
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[1] Microsoft's pad was announced earlier! Of course, I'm told it also didn't look much like an iPad. In demo-theatre, as in curling, it pays to move last.
[2] If products they are. Demos are at least one order of magnitude easier to cough out than shipping products are. Of course you can build a demo of a pad. That's a couple weeks of work or less.
It's people like Grubber and you that want a clear cause-and-effect. To them, the iPhone was the genesis and everything that's mobile and touch derives from it. To me, this is a lot like people claiming Nirvana invented Grunge. No, there was a scene/movement, they were a part of it and they were the ones that hit it big and influenced it. But to claim anything more is a big mistake.
In order to defend your absurd "there would be no touch without Apple" stance, you're going to great lengths here - accusing multiple companies of successful espionage against Apple for years in a row. Instead, you could face that fact that there were many companies with touchscreen devices, that there was much research in the area (both by companies such as the MS with the Surface and various independent researchers) and technology like high-res capacitative (vs the older, cheaper, crappier resistive) screens were becoming more available.
I'm not sure where the "there would be no touch without Apple" quote comes from (parent's parent may have edited) but I agree it's false. Trivially provable, since Apple did not invent multitouch, they purchased the company/guy who did, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks
If only the cause-and-effect were so clear. The iPhone was rumored for years before it was released; it was surely in manufacturing prototype for many months before it was announced, and then it was announced months before it actually shipped.
Apple is legendary for keeping its secrets well. But even major government agencies can't keep secrets perfectly. Espionage works. And I'm sure that lots of people in China were in a position to figure out Apple's plans in advance. (Note how poorly the iPad's secrets were kept relative to the iPhone. The biggest advantage Apple had with the iPod and iPhone was the element of surprise: Nobody thought of Apple as a music-player company, or a telephony company, so nobody was focusing too hard on Apple product espionage. They're focused now, though.)
So the argument that these various contemporaneous iPhone-like devices would have happened without the iPhone is pretty weak. For example, just because Google and Microsoft announced iPad knockoffs within days of the iPad announcement [1] doesn't mean that those products [2] were going to happen with or without Apple.
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[1] Microsoft's pad was announced earlier! Of course, I'm told it also didn't look much like an iPad. In demo-theatre, as in curling, it pays to move last.
[2] If products they are. Demos are at least one order of magnitude easier to cough out than shipping products are. Of course you can build a demo of a pad. That's a couple weeks of work or less.