He was pretty specifically talking about the Newton, which produced either decently captured raster handwriting or questionably recognized plain text. You don't want to be the one telling people to use a device in a way which is best described as questionable. The iPhone produces reasonably keyed plain text, or questionably smudged handwriting. Since adding cellular modems to handheld devices was straightforward engineering at the time, that inversion of input is probably what made the iPhone take another five years of work when they returned to the idea after stabilizing OS X.
You know, I might have to dig out my MessagePad 2000 to check, but I'm not all that certain I get better recognition on my iPhone than I did on that. I frequently have to go back and correct words on the iPhone, too (usually because my 3G iPhone is laggy or I'm using words like "laggy" that aren't in the dictionary.)
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The iPhone does have a keyboard in the sense that he meant: he didn't want a "little scribble thing"...which the software keyboard is not.
Specifically, Palm Graffiti.
He was pretty specifically talking about the Newton, which produced either decently captured raster handwriting or questionably recognized plain text. You don't want to be the one telling people to use a device in a way which is best described as questionable. The iPhone produces reasonably keyed plain text, or questionably smudged handwriting. Since adding cellular modems to handheld devices was straightforward engineering at the time, that inversion of input is probably what made the iPhone take another five years of work when they returned to the idea after stabilizing OS X.
You know, I might have to dig out my MessagePad 2000 to check, but I'm not all that certain I get better recognition on my iPhone than I did on that. I frequently have to go back and correct words on the iPhone, too (usually because my 3G iPhone is laggy or I'm using words like "laggy" that aren't in the dictionary.)