There were plenty of phones with touchscreens before the iPhone. They were crap, with mostly resistive touchscreens, but they existed.

I had a rebranded version of this: https://www.gsmarena.com/qtek_s200-1417.php

My office-mate had one of these a little later: https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_ke850_prada-1828.php

(Fun fact: after playing with the Prada phone and seeing how awful it was, we wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the CEO of LG applying for roles in their phone development team, which we actually posted to South Korea. Months later, we received a reply from someone in the UK office of LG, denying our application, and not showing any sign of getting the joke.)