No they didn't. They did something else entirely, but it's so invisible that apparently nobody thinks of it. We had touchscreen smartphones well before the iPhone came out. And if you leave out the phone, we already had a comparable feature set back in 2000 with devices like the Sony Clie. None of that was revolutionary. What WAS revolutionary about the iPhone was the introduction of App Store (with the iPhone 3G). That's what made the iPhone the success it is and created the ecosystem needed to sustain it. They also introduced the iPhone at exactly the right time w.r.t. the state of battery, touchscreen and networking technology and Internet penetration. So if you're going to give credit to Apple for their inventions (which they deserve - don't get me wrong), let's do it for the right reasons: The App Store and perfect timing. The rest is just high-quality copy-catting.

Conceptually, this beat them both by about 7 years.

https://www.zdnet.com/product/handspring-visorphone/

People who get hung up on what phone they are carrying are usually people who are least likely to afford an iPhone. I know several people working minimum wage jobs in Silicon Valley who are ordering the iPhone XS MAX 512GB for $350 down and $46 per month. They would be better off financially by buying a pre-owned iPhone 7 outright for $288.

List of impressive smartphone innovations:

- Artificially low amounts of internal persistent storage completely out of whack with current technology coupled with refusal to provide SD expansion

As long as a phone as the features you want, what difference does it make which phone had them first, or how they ended up on your phone?

People who care about this kind of stuff...I mean...honestly. It's just the technonerd version of "My dad can beat up your dad."

Why does it matter what car I drive, where I live or what phone I use? People are broken. AI will want to fix us.

Sometimes you just have to try an idea to see if it's practical, and see what software developers do it with. Being on the cutting edge means the idea may just flub out.

It involves cooling the RAM chips with some kind of refrigerant spray. So yeah, you need the computer you do this with to be right in front of you and powered on and logged into at least once by some user with a key you want.

So slave labor, minimum wage, shit working conditions...

This problem is easy to solve, make a law that requires all batteries to be removable.

For me that's been true for 20 years, and I also had an 8088! You must have been some rich kid with a HD, everybody else was booting from floppy.

Stick with Apple. Buy American, support American companies and the Americans they employ, and put your money where your mouth is.