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Then the iPhone was released, and everything changed. Suddenly, we all expected so much more from our handsets; they weren’t just phones, but smartphones. Sure, there were already BlackBerrys and Palm Treos and an assortment of other handsets that were bigger and more capable than a flip phone, but they were not that easy to use and there wasn’t all that much you could do with them. There was nothing on the market even close to the iPhone in terms of its display, touchscreen, user experience, and—perhaps most importantly—wow factor. The iPhone (coupled with the App Store, which came a year later in 2008), didn’t just redefine a category; it created it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608835/apple-needs-an-entirely-new-iphone-not-just-a-new-version/
