You have your facts wrong. The iPod touch came out after the iPhone, and previous to the iPhone there were no devices out there that had the same design. Everyone was making stylus or physical keyboard based smart phones before the iPhone came out. Virtually all the major players in the smart phone market universally panned the iPhone for taking the major risk of having one large screen be the main means of input. Boy were they wrong.
You're completely right, I have it backwards [red face]. It was an iPhone which I saw and thought that it would make a sweet iPod if they just removed the phone.
Nevertheless, though I agree that there were no devices out there with the same design, the idea was ripe. Surely the concept of manipulating the screen directly rather than through a stylus or buttons is abstract enough to stop calling it 'copying'.
In other words, it's such an obviously natural interface that someone was eventually going to do it first, so we can stop saying that anyone after the winner of that race is copying.
Well, if you re-read my original post you'd find I'm essentially agreeing with you. You can always point to someone who's "copying" someone else because nobody innovates in a vacuum. So why bother pointing it out?
