I am sure someone with quibble that some other product technically had something similar first, and they are probably right. But the iPhone demo was the first time I had seen anything quite like it.
Turning on a light bulb, ordinary light in the house, meh, ok, then swipe your hands out over the counter and the recipe pulls up. That's the 'oh wow' moment. Then grab and throw a song to a Homepod connection. You know what I mean...
There's a gap someone can shoot, maybe 3 years tops. Honestly though, the developer ecosystem is just so tight, continuity so powerful, doing this solo requires more than what the whole MFi program offers.
At the time my feature phone had much better MMS, video calling, and J2ME apps. The first iPhone was a joke by comparison looked at through that lens, and detractors generally were looking at the fact it was this hobbled 2G device missing features that were common in other, cheaper phones. Oh, and the camera was absolute garbage, too.
MMS worked well enough but was/is pretty limited. Video calling existed but postage stamp video at 8 frames per second was not something that anyone wanted to actually use. And don't get me started on J2ME, an ecosystem so vast that Google didn't even bother to include it in Android even though they are both based on Java. Although other phones had better cameras, none took what we would call an acceptable photos today.
What people did use all the time was the browser and only the iPhone had a decent one. That was the only thing that mattered. Heck, the iPhone wasn't even a very good _phone_ and even that didn't matter.
I based my purchase of phones in the early to mid 00s on whether they came with the full Opera Mobile browser.
I could use just about everything online the same as desktop, that didn't rely on flash of course. The screen size was small but surprisingly wasn't a big issue as everything else was a massive improvement.
Oh Nokia 3660, how I loved thee. I actually chose the 3650 and then 3660 because they seemed to be the best smartphones at a standard sized. I just couldn't justify qwerty.
You have to put it in context with what passed for a smart phone back then. No web browser (they sort of existed but were extremely cut down and not really usable), small screens with limited software, very limited connectivity that was very expensive.
A valid criticism was the lack of physical keyboard, which phone-jockies found a deal breaker, but in all other ways a phone with decent apps, a large screen, a real web browser designed around and provided with unlimited internet connectivity was always going to be a hit.
It wasn't even that expensive compared to other phones.