Comment on Recognize the mother of Wifi
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 5 months agoCapacitive touchscreens are the essential technology not just in the iPhone but in all smartphones. Without them we’d still be using flip phones and BlackBerry chiclet keyboards. I think it’s fair to call Johnson the father of the smartphone!
Marcbmann@lemmy.world 5 months ago
How about father of the touch screen? There’s a fuck ton of technology in smartphones.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 5 months ago
There is, but most of that technology was in phones and other devices before smartphones came along.
Marcbmann@lemmy.world 5 months ago
And touch screens were in devices other than smart phones before smart phones came along.
So again, father of the touchscreen, sure. But he did not make smartphones happen. He has nothing to do with 99% of the technology in smartphones.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Sure, but the touchscreen is arguably the thing that defines a smartphone. It is the part you interact with and the only part the user really sees.
We had phones before capable of surfing the web and taking and editing pictures. Like Blackberry. But those aren’t really seen as smartphones, more like slightly smarter dumbphones.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 5 months ago
He invented the capacitive touch screen. The resistive touch screen was in many devices long before smart phones (bank machines being a common example). The resistive touch screen was fine for those applications but it was useless for the smart phone (too unresponsive). The capacitive touch screen’s first killer app was the smartphone, namely the iPhone.