You're forgetting the massive impact the iPhone had on the mobile web.

Before the iPhone was released, the mobile web was a mixture of rudimentary WAP/WML, or if you were lucky awful browsers that tried to render HTML. Everybody hated it.

Then the iPhone was released and it had a web browser in the same ballpark as real desktop browsers. What's more, WebKit was open-source. In next to no time, all the major phone vendors had a WebKit-based browser of their own and the mobile web took off.

Yes, if Apple didn't release the iPhone, eventually we would have gotten decent mobile web browsers. But phone vendors were doing an awful job of it up until Apple moved the whole industry forward. The only other possibility would have been Opera, but that would have required unrealistic licensing deals to have the same impact as the iPhone, and Opera ended up switching to WebKit too.

You're also forgetting about the effect the App Store had on the mobile marketplace. Before the iPhone, buying a mobile application tended to be something that nobody did. Every app had to roll their own payment infrastructure – it was painful for developers to charge and it was painful for customers to pay. Then the App Store came along and made it easy. There was little movement on centralising this beforehand from any other vendor, but as soon as Apple did it, everybody else hopped on the bandwagon.

I'm not arguing that smartphone was a huge step forward, just saying that it was only a matter of "when" and "who" not "if". Also, as for mobile web boom, I think the introduction of 3g was the key factor, there was only so much you could do with GPRS/WAP..

> only a matter of "when" and "who" not "if"

Yeah, that was my thought exactly. However, iPhone software was so radically different from everything else at the time that I still wonder "what" it would have been and what the App Store revolution would have looked like.

Of course, in this alternate universe it's just as likely that other amazing advancements happened because Apple didn't do iPhone.

Sure, it would have happened eventually, but not in the 1–2 year timeframe you mentioned. Not even close, judging by the lack of progress from other vendors.

3G wasn't the deciding factor, the first iPhone didn't have it but responsive sites started popping up right away. There's also no point in 3G for web browsing unless you have a decent rendering engine – WML and XHTML Basic sites were hardly data hogs.

You probably have very short memory, since when iphone 1 came out, everybody was shocked from how much better it was above anything else, and how different and better the whole experience was. Touch screen, gyroscope, sleek design compared to pen-based ridiculous slow boxy windows CE machines.

I am far from Apple fan boy and never actually owned any of their products, but boy they really brought mobile revolution to this world. It took competition many years to catch up with that, with great help of Google and their Android. Main reason why their share price skyrocketed during that time.

Blackberries predate iphone. But, you couldn't get one cheap with a phone contract. Also, it leveraged everyone's ipod song list. Not to mention the cool factor of the iphone.