[efaref]

I think this was just more of a function of technology. Good quality capacitive touchscreens only really started to become available in the mid 2000s, and even the early ones weren't that great (e.g. no multi-touch). Without this you're forced into using keyboards if you want to have any kind of usable interface for typing, or you do something like the graffiti writing system that psion PDAs had in the 90s.

[orev]

The CoRecursive podcast has an episode with Chet Haase where he specifically outlines how they were cloning BlackBerry and then had to drop everything and rebuild when they heard about the iPhone OS. He directly states that Android wouldn’t have had a touch interface if the iPhone didn’t exist.

GUI interfaces using a capacitive touch screen became good because of iPhone, not as part of a natural progression of technology.

[freitzkriesler2]

No they were just pressure sensitive screens. You could use a finger to navigate but again not as accurate. The solution instead was to perfect one handed navigation which was what palm os 5 did and input writing with either a keyboard (handheld/onscreen) or graffiti like you said.