According to Fortune, before Jon Rubenstein stepped into to change up just about everything Palm was doing, the Pre was to sport a resistive touch screen with a stylus. The story goes :

Rubinstein started, in his words, “hanging out” with Palm people in late June. He didn’t like what he saw. The hardware for the Pre needed to be scrapped and rebooted. For one thing, prototypes were using old “resistive” touchscreen technology that responds to a user physically pushing the screen, not the newer “capacitive” technology manipulated by the electricity in the user’s body. Rubinstein tossed out the old phone’s hardware and built a new one in about 15 months. “We were basically running a marathon and doing a heart transplant in the middle of it,” says Rubinstein.

You have to wonder who was running Palm at the time. Thanks gawd for Rubenstein.

[Via:PreCentral]