Comedy "smartphone" attempts? I had a couple of smart phones before the iPhone came out and they offered several things it didn't. The fact that capacitive touchscreens and GPU acceleration weren't as good yet doesn't make them "comedy attempts". More like the incremental developments that provided the base which the iPhone was built upon.

Ignoring the fact that it's all moot now, I was doing GPS navigation, multitasking, audio streaming, and rudimentary video calling on some of those "comedy attempts" from 2005-2007 and I did a lot of it with my fingers as well. The iPhone improved on the touch aspect quite a bit but it's not as if it wasn't missing 10 other things that were common to smartphones of the time.

And that only makes sense. It's good business to focus on the things your competition isn't doing as it allows you to target different parts of the market.

There are two kinds of personal computing products in any era:

* Blatant copies of some Apple product

* Rough prototypes of some future Apple product

So, in your era Apple is the centre of the universe?