Controversial Touchscreen Keyboard

It’s hard to believe now, but the iPhone entered a world where every other smartphone — even the nascent Android phones of the time — had physical keyboards. The touchscreen keyboard on the iPhone was actually somewhat controversial, and many users doubted that Apple could pull it off. However, thanks to an advanced autocorrect algorithm and some other clever UI features, many users were pleasantly surprised by how well it actually worked.

The touchscreen keyboard was also even more appealing to those users who had been suffering with the old-school T9 predictive text entry system, which relied on pecking out text messages through multiple presses on a numeric keypad. The iPhone came at a time when 95 percent of mobile phone users were still using what we’d today call “feature phones.”