We at GigaOM, decided to do a retrospective on the occasion of iPhone’s 5th birthday. Here is a snippet from my post, Touched by greatness: the iPhone years, which takes a trip down the memory lane and pays homage to devices before the iPhone.

What they didn’t realize or didn’t see was that iPhone had this one magical quality — touch, the most human of all senses — that made it the most personal of all computers. Think about it — we shake hands to confirm our relationship. We touch and hug to show our love. We caress to tell someone we care. So when we touch that phone, we don’t just touch a device and its screen, we make it part of ourselves. The internet is not a strange, cold, uncomfortable, cluttered space. That touch is what turns an inanimate object from metal and plastic to an extension of ourselves. (And that is why Apple worked really hard to get the touch right.) The touch-ability is what prompts people to use the phone again and again. And in the process, it transforms our relationship with the network.