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Steve Jobs is notorious for hating buttons. Here's Jobs explaining the foulness of buttons during his famous iPhone introduction:
What's wrong with their [other phones] user interface? The problem with them is really sort of in the bottom 40. They all have these keyboard that are there whether you need them or not to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons just for it. And what happens if you think of a great idea six months from now? You can't run around and add a button to these things. They're already shipped. So what do you do? It doesn't work because the buttons and the controls can't change.
The iPhone solved the button problem with a new multi-touch screen and by using your finger as the pointing device (not a nasty nasty stylus). We all know how this works now, but it was novel back in the olden days.
The iPhone was one of three new products based on revolutionary user interface development: the mouse and the Macintosh; the click-wheel and the iPod; multi-touch and the iPhone.
UI innovation is not enough on its own. Creating a new product category requires a combination of advanced hardware and new supporting software. The Mac was a completely new everything. The iPod paired with iTunes. And the iPhone leveraged OS X, iTunes, and a lot of very smart code for dealing with touch.
That's the history lesson.
Something curious has happened. Amazon. Amazon has escaped the land of misfit phones and has developed three brilliant new products based on revolutionary UIs and sophisticated software systems:
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