None of these were more than a blip in the market. Nothing today even remotely resembles these devices, inherits design language from them, or points back in any way to them. They are historical dead ends and nearly irrelevant.

Meanwhile the majority of people on earth own one or multiple devices that are more or less clones of the original iPhone, only faster, larger, thinner, and exponentially more capable.

True, I would never argue the iPhone wasn't a transformational step-up in usability that made smartphones a mainstream device category thanks to the App Store and slab screen with multi-touch.

But at the same time.... I had been doing nearly everything the iPhone could do in terms of raw functionality (plus plenty of stuff that took 1+ years to land on iPhones) on multiple different Windows Mobile and Palm smartphones pre-iPhone.

Saying pre-iPhone smartphones don't count because "ugly nerdphone with gross keyboard" is just as ridiculous as a "iPhone was overhyped and no better than existing smartphones" claim.

Apple created a device category within smartphones that then consumed and became what we now think of as a "smartphone" after iPhone and Android together strangled the first movers.

Like, the famous Steve Jobs "an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator" line was just listing standard smartphone features by that point. More or less the definition of a smartphone in fact.