Comment by mezeek
9 hours ago
It's not a lie. All you need to do is watch the unveiling.
The most important bit (and reason it's not a lie) is when Jobs demoed scrolling.
"So... here i have all my songs... how do i scroll? I just... take my finger, and swipe".
You can hear the crowd visibly gasp. Every product before was arrow-keypad based and was not designed for touch. Plus it didn't have a desktop level OS, plus the capabilities of a desktop level OS. There was no equivalent.
There were plenty of phones with touchscreens before the iPhone. They were crap, with mostly resistive touchscreens, but they existed.
I had a rebranded version of this: https://www.gsmarena.com/qtek_s200-1417.php
My office-mate had one of these a little later: https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_ke850_prada-1828.php
(Fun fact: after playing with the Prada phone and seeing how awful it was, we wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the CEO of LG applying for roles in their phone development team, which we actually posted to South Korea. Months later, we received a reply from someone in the UK office of LG, denying our application, and not showing any sign of getting the joke.)