It was almost as if the American tech press was completely unfamiliar with the mobile world outside USA (never mind being stupefyingly in love with Apple), and thus they praised iPhone like something unique in the mobile world when it launched.
The real puzzler though is that the rest of the world's tech press parroted that message like they believed it, when they should have known better.
S60 was a horrid codebase and very hard to wrangle into modern things.
UIQ was a cleaner smaller codebase where the main big apps (e.g. messaging) didn't actually use the latest greatest parts of the framework. UIQ was always being dragged in opposing directions by its two big owners - Sony Ericsson and Motorola. Sony Ericsson had some success with their early P800 and just wanted to keep on iterating that with the P900 etc, whereas Motorola wanted smarter feature phones and features like keypad navigation. Neither wanted capacitive touch, despite UIQ suggesting it umpteen times.
The Symbian codebase was an antiquated C++ dialect. I happened to have liked it, and found it very expressive and powerful and simple, but there was definitely a learning curve.
When the iphone came along it was so simple and beautiful and had a capacitive screen and basically everything else was obsolete immediately.
Android was unreleased and actually had an extensional crisis at that point, but they quickly revamped it to be more iphone-like and launched.
At that point everyone else thought "android will be cheaper to develop!" and dropped Symbian just as quick as they could.
And I don't blame them.
Recall that Nokia blog post that was quickly removed, about only devs that get paid would develop for Symbian?
When version 3 came out I was expecting Symbian C++ would be replaced by proper C++, given the overhaul the system got for security support.
Yet, the OS itself with its mikro-kernel architecture, C++ instead of C, task based architecture and security model was quite interesting from OS architecture point of view.
The updated Belle version was quite a joy to use on my Nokia C6-01.
http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/13/2612736/ios-history-iphon...
What the iphone1 did was look and feel gorgeous. It was entirely the user experience that made it an obvious winner that made Symbian obsolete overnight.
I had top of the line Symbian/UIQ phone when I got the original iPhone. Despite not having user-installable apps nor 3G, I still remember the amazing "sci-fi" feeling of the iPhone. Graphics, display quality, ux, responsiviness, web browser etc. were superior compared to my SonyEricsson.
Of course, on the other hand, the "masses" should care a tad more about security.