Steve jobs said it back in 07
Jobs was the ultimate salesman, for sure! Anyone who's done similar dog and pony shows, had to admire his way with words.
For example, he talked about keyboards taking up precious frontal space, while carefully ignoring the fact that on-screen keyboards also take up precious display space when being used... a UI problem which slide-out keyboards solve.
For that matter, he was clever to only show smartphone designs with front keyboards. But then, it wouldn't have been so dramatic if he'd compared the new 2007 iPhone against, say, a real life WinCE touch phone from 2005:
skip to 6:33 in......youll laugh...i Promise
Indeed, the part where he calls it "magic" did bring laughter from the crowd. They knew that meant he was heading off into RDF land, which was the most entertaining part of his presentations.
His main point was that it didn't need a stylus, which had far more to do with the size of UI elements than anything else. (Other phones didn't need a stylus to recognize a touch, either.)
"Far more accurate" than what? Certainly not more than a stylus. In fact, Apple's touch implementation deliberately throws out tiny touches because it's geared towards seeing fat fingertips. Perhaps he meant more
sensitive because of the capacitive screen? That would make sense.
Finally, there's the famous "we patented it" comment, which partly referred to Jobs' mistaken belief that Apple invented multi-touch or pinch-to-zoom... misconceptions which would help make him so angry at Google four years later. Apple even tried to trademark the name "Multi-Touch" (and failed due to Jeff Han's intervention).
Great stuff, but Jobs' sales pitches unfortunately led a lot of people to innocently believe in some rather inaccurate ideas. (E.g. all phones had keyboards, Apple invented multi-touch or even touchscreens, they were first with apps, 3G used too much battery in 2007 but suddenly was okay in 2008, etc.) Listening to Jobs on a roll, is like listening to a late night TV infomercial: take them both with a large grain of salt.
