In most of the original efforts to launch highly portable devices or tablet computing, most takes on a new model included a stylus and some form of handwriting recognition, the assumption being that the model for an ultraportable computing device had to be a pen and notebook.
It was the MODEL for tablet and smartphone/pdas which was wrong...and mostly because no implementation could be made seamless and elegant enough to come close to rapid, easy handwriting recognition..and the interfaces for stylus with handwriting recognition were all (possible exception Palm) horrible and clunky.
What Apple has really accomplished with the iphone is to create a new model for interacting with a computing device. The risk they took was whether the soft keyboard would be accepted. At the launch of the iphone, the most successful mobile device/smartphone was the blackberry, and blackberry had "proven" that a smartphone HAD to have a keyboard, and some would say that that keyboard had to be physical.
By executing so well on a gesture based interface model including a soft keyboard, Apple was able to create a clean, simple, and highly compressible UI that was a perfect model for smartphones, and will very likely prove to be a perfect model for tablet computing as well.
As imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (and of proof that a new model vs simply a new product is on the move) Google is playing Microsoft and copying the Apple model with Android. It remains to be seen which companies products will dominate the tablet and smartphone markets, but wc can be certain that the model has changed, and we are once again on the verge of a sea change in computing.
This coming decade will be defined by computing and data mobility, inextricably linked with social networking and geographically aware applications. Its going to be interesting looking back in 2020.
Happy New Year!
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