As others have said, yes, they existed. Take a look at the iPhone announcement. Steve Jobs even showed off a few to demonstrate how awful they were.
Yep, but notice that he didn't show any touch phones
. Which is why a lot of newbies still mistakenly think there were none, even though even Samsung had sold an all touch phone with fingertip scrolling in Korea the year before! (The one at upper right below.)
Granted, he was showing off how much frontal space a physical keyboard took on some models, as an argument for a software keyboard doing the same thing when it appeared. Go figure.
However, he totally avoided showing touch phones with slide out keyboards, which were in a way the best of both worlds, by not covering any part of the display at all when in use.
I remember thinking that it all comes down to how well multi-touch works in practice. The resistive touch screens of the time were horrible to use, inaccurate and unresponsive. I was hooked as soon as I tried the phone in person.
I think you mean capacitive touch screens. There are such things as multitouch resistive screens. In fact, there is now at least one model which is so sensitive, it can even discern the different hairs in a paint brush! Imagine how useful that would be to an artist.
Even in 2006 though, there were resistive screens that felt almost (but not quite) as nice as capacitive. I had one phone where it only took a feather touch for strokes to register.
Apple didn't invent mult-touch, they bought the company, FingerWorks, who invented it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks
FingerWorks did not invent multi-touch. In fact, if you read the founder's 1999 thesis, it contains tons of references back to such things in the 1980s. For example, this section on his page 39:
"
Rubine [129, 130] reports seeing another multi-touch tablet demonstrated at AT&T in 1988 (note:invented in 1983) by Robert Boie which could detect all ten fingers. It boasted a 30-39 fps frame rate and resolution of 1 mil (.025 mm) in lateral position and 10 bits in pressure. Possibly it measured sensor capacitance with the synchronous detection technology in a 1995 patent by Boie et al. [17] that briefly mentions multi-touch tablets as an application." - Westerman thesis
Or if you're in a rush, just read
Bill Buxton's piece on multi-touch history. And here's an abbreviated chart:
This is why some of us old timers hang around here. Factual history is often being lost to internet myths.
I remember when it was just a rumor that they were working on a smartphone and everyone wanted to know what it would even look like.
I would check this site for any news or to see if I could finally get a peek at the iPhone but the closest we got were just mockups.
The mockups got pretty ridiculous by the way with everyone thinking that it would likely look like an iPod but with a numpad as well.
Some of the rumors were pretty good. Like by November 2006, we had heard from China sources that Foxconn was contracted to build the new device, which everyone was already calling the "iPhone".
And yes, while like 98% of the fan mockups were mashups of iPods and phones (which almost happened, too!), a few came amazingly close to the final design (which is yet more evidence that Apple did not invent the basic shape that they sued Samsung over). Here's two of the best fan concepts from 2006: