I don't know what was going on in the USA, but in the Europe people were using pre-ios/droid smartphones massively (and we basically didn't have any Blackberries due to region limitations). There were a ton of the WinMob PDAs, there were years of advanced HTC communicators which started expensive but dropped to a very cheap levels fast. At some point almost every taxi driver had been using one (it was easy to observe because drivers were using phones for nav in the cradles). The demand was super high. People were comparing generations of those early smartphones for example about GPS lock speed, because it was an age when receivers were rapidly improving and every gen shaved of minutes of lock time. And before WinMob era there were advanced Simbian 60 (iirc) devices, middle and high-end Nokia, Siemens, Motorola phones, with apps. Half of my class in school and uni were using phones with all support for texting, reading books, music and games.

Retconning phone history as if there was nothing between flip phones and first iPhone, or that transition time was short is dishonest.