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
- Sam Altman addresses RAM comments: People should ‘put as much as they want in their computers’
- Anker’s new window-mounted camera monitors the outside of your home from within it
- Those Jeff Bezos hair transplant photos are very fake
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time never gets old
- Bambu’s nine-nozzle H3C foretells the future of 3D printing
