Pre-iPhone was full of all the elements to make an iPhone, but was clearly lacking business people (even in the mobile industry who were raking in money) to push the investment.

PDAs with vibrant full color screens and "acceptable" OSes predated the iPhone. Mobile internet was around for quite a while with awful text interfaces and crap standards.

What was probably missing was a good OS. What happened is that anything beyond a text OS, the industry cowered before the might of Microsoft, and Microsoft can't design UI for a damn, they can only copy it, or put the minimum amount in to try to keep other people from succeeding.

I don't even want to say Apple did some revolutionary job of making the iPhone OS. They just didn't do a terrible one like Microsoft, or hamstring themselves with bad hardware like Palm. Apple simply made a good OS atop a good hardware integration. And that was enough to vastly separate it from all the beancounter businesspeople and Microsoft incompetence.

Microsoft had at least 5 years to establish itself with windows CE and others, but they are just not a competent company when they don't have a monopoly to leverage.

I am not a Jobs fan or an Apple fan, especially since they are as or more anticompetitive than Microsoft, but the pre-iPhone scene really was fundamentally hamstrung by failure-almost-by-design on the part of the business people involved, and so Apple gets credit for that.

But yeah, kudos to those people that pushed the fundamental paradigms and programming, including Apple with the Newton and Palm that kept it moving forward.