The iPhone was highly, highly anticipated. For years, people were conjecturing about it. In 2006, Dan Lyons, under the pseudonym "Fake Steve Jobs", joked coincidentally that the iPhone would have only one button: "Our designers tell me we need at least 12 buttons so we can have all the numbers plus * and # symbols. I’m telling them to go back and do it over. I want one button. No more, no less. One."[1]

One of the reasons for all this speculation is that smartphones totally sucked back then.

Russell Beattie, one of the main mobile/smartphone bloggers at the time, wrote a great piece in 2004:
"Steve Jobs has a mobile phone. I'm not sure which mobile phone it is, but he's definltely got one. And he hates it. He curses at it every day. He hates it like he hated the original IBM PC. He hates how hard it is to add contacts and make calls and he cringes at the web experience and the Java games, if he's even bothered to try them. He holds it in his hand during long trips and admires some things about it, but knows he could do it better. He knows that if Apple decided to make a mobile phone, it would be the most intuitive and elegant mobile phone in the world."[2]

It's hard to understand how bad the situation was without actually using the mobile computing technology that existed at the time. In the late 90's, I had owned a couple generations of Palm PDAs, which were pretty good, but I stopped carrying a PDA around because I didn't want to fill my pockets with both a Palm and a Nokia flip phone. I started developing mobile apps in 2002 (mostly BREW/J2ME, later Blackberry/Symbian/WinMo), so I was in the industry and had access to literally 100's of phones of every type. They were all terrible. By the late-2000's I had been waiting 7 years for a phone that was as sleek and usable as a Palm PDA.

My work phone was a Samsung Blackjack (Windows Mobile). If the screen brightness was set to anything bright enough so it was visible indoors in a brightly lit room, the battery would die in 3 hrs. Even when I dimmed it so it was hard to read (indoors, mind you), the battery life was barely over 4 hours. It was slow and flakey, and I only used it to read email occasionally.

My personal phone was a Sony Ericsson M600. I bought it in 2006 despite knowing Symbian was terrible (based on my experiences with Series 60 and 90 devices), because I had gotten tired of waiting for a decent smartphone, and this one was thin enough to fit easily in a pocket. But it sucked. Totally unreadable screen outdoors. Unusable as a pocket computer.

You'd hear nice things about Danger Hiptop/Sidekick, but that was mostly due to the ease of typing on the keyboard. Same with Blackberry keyboard along with the scroll wheel. Usability-wise, the Palm Treo was nice, but it was fat and clunky, with a non-preemptive OS that kept crashing. Oh also, people liked those phones because they were much, much better at messaging. On WinMo and Symbian, text messages used to be like email. You could not view your text conversation with a person in one scrolling view -- instead, incoming messages went to an inbox, and your outgoing messages were in a sent folder.

So when I saw the iPhone keynote in 2007, I was blown away. It looked amazing. I was not expecting a non-stylus phone. I had no doubt that I'd get one, but at $700, it was out of my budget. A few months later Apple dropped the price to $400 so then I immediately bought one, and it was just amazing in hand as in the keynote.

It was interesting how there were a lot of people who were still skeptical about the iPhone. It took years before it seemed to dawn on everyone in the industry that the iPhone would destroy Nokia, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile.

Every phone manufacturer was desperately trying to make a touchscreen phone that was anywhere near as good, but it took them years to figure it out, and some never did. They were quick to copy the form factor with a big touchscreen, but there were so many details that made the whole experience. It wasn't just the touch UI or things like the dynamic keyboard's dynamic touch areas, there were numerous other aspects that didn't get copied until years later. The non-user-replaceable battery life. The way a photosensor adjusted the screen brightness based on ambient light, and turned off the screen when pressed against your ear. The debate over capacitive vs resistive touchscreen technology [3].

There are very few times I've seen something that was as totally disruptive. You might have been too young to remember the iPhone in 2007, but you might be more aware of how Tesla Model S was winning street races and winning safety awards, until finally all the automotive manufacturers capitulated and announced plans to start building EVs? And certainly you're aware of SpaceX's rise to dominance in the space launch market, or how Starlink is disrupting satellite internet service. The iPhone was sort of like that, but the competition was much worse, if you can imagine that.

[1] https://www.fakesteve.net/2006/09/tabula-rasa.html
[2] https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008182
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20100327033813/http://labs.moto....