alt Hacker NewsThat might also be because iPhone happened to coincide exactly when 3G mobile broadband internet became available.
Pre and post 3G mobile broadband were different worlds.
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3G connectivity was available for several years before the first iPhone launched. I had 3G phones in the US in 2005.
iPhone was late to the 3G game. It was one of the complaints of the original iPhone, that it didn't have 3G despite so many other devices out there already having it.
3G smartphones (mostly Nokia N60 platform) were a thing from about 2002 in some European markets, with rather limited uptake. The real killer feature of the iPhone, at least initially (remember the first one didn't have 3G in any case) was a browser that didn't make you want to throw the thing out the window in frustration every time you used it.
The iPhone was pleasant to use, or at least not actively infuriating. That was, to a large extent, all it took.
Nokia really messed up, here; there was nothing stopping them making an iPhone-ish thing (perhaps without multitouch) a few years previous to the iPhone coming out, and there was even a semi-decent third party browser for their platform (Opera) which they could have taken cues from or bought, but they were always far more excited about the featurephone market, seeing smartphones as a niche.
It absolutely was on the ragged edge of viable. In the first one (and 3G) you could easily scroll a webpage faster than it could render it.
But it did what it needed enough to be extremely compelling. And it improved very fast in the early years.