Creating a touch screen as successful as the original iPhone requires much more research and testing than we might imagine. One thing they quickly realized in Cupertino is that because of the shape of our finger we don’t touch where we want to touch something that our iPhone, even the latest models, has to take into account.
The shape of our finger has a lot to say
Let’s do a test. Let’s turn our iPhone over and try to use it. We press a button, try to type something and quickly notice that it seems that our target has gone on vacation. There is no way to press any buttons. We play too high or too low, what’s going on
as we remember Ken Kocienda in a tweet, the curvature of the finger causes us to feel that we touch the screen noticeably higher than we actually do. A good touch screen has to take this into account and correct it, and that is why using the iPhone upside down is almost impossible.
In that top-secret project called the iPhone, something as simple as slightly raising the point of contact with the screen when passing touch to the operating system was crucial to the iPhone’s success. Thanks to this resource we find ourselves before a virtual keyboard that we could really use and before an iPhone that knew very well where we wanted to play.
This is one of the many curiosities behind the original iPhone. Another is the reason iOS icons measure exactly 57 pixels, which is directly related to the touch-enabled nature of your screen. Curiosities that are still present in the most current iPhone and that, without a doubt, surprise when knowing their reasons.