Were you around when the iPhone came out? Do you remember the day you first saw it? As it frustrates me people reinventing history. I remember seeing an iPhone for the first time. It was literally a total game changer, revolutionary is a fair word and I use it rarely.

It was years ahead of anything else on the market. The UX was incredible. Everything just worked without incredibly complicated interfaces and clicking a million different options.

You're not looking at the whole product hard enough. The UX is what made it so incredible. The fact it was touch based when everyone said there wasn't a market or that it was too expensive was an added bonus rather than the main feature. But that multi-touch screen enabled Apple to make a truly gorgeous UX. The way it all ties together. The little (and totally un-noticable) UX features that just make it all work so well but you don't notice them any more because they're so ubiquitous because Android copied them all.

Specific examples:

1. The web browser. I remember being incredulous at the time. Nonsense! I said. Viewing normal websites on a mobile? It'll be unusable! Phooey! Then my friend passed me his iPhone and I played with the wonderful pinch and zoom. I switched websites using the on screen keyboard that unobtrusively appeared like magic when I clicked on the address. I was astounded. And totally proved wrong. They were very nascent at the time. People used to have to make websites specifically for browsers and no-one really bothered. My old company did for their browser based application (quite revolutionary at the time) and it was an extremely limited subset of functionality. See your own link, the first one, for how useless the first attempts were. What on earth are those little icons in the top right corner?

And Apple just walked into a market they had no experience with and, Plop! Incredible mobile web browser straight out the gate.

2. The home screen. You could customise it! And move stuff around. And it's accessible without pressing back 20 times! Wow. No longer were you locked into having the media player as option 8 that you had to press 9 buttons to get to. Gah, those old phone screens still make me shudder. They pretty much exposed every setting as a gigantic list on your home screen. And there were so many options. I still feel a little surprised every time I open the iPhone's general settings.

3. The contacts book, no phone before the iPhone had a usable contact book. It was a list. If you were lucky you could search. But that would probably be at least a few button presses on top of the search.

4. Text message interface. Totally different to how other phones did it, conversation based instead of just a list (see your own link for how it used to be done).

5. The email tie-in. A simple UX for emails? Nice little notifications? Push? In a consumer phone? It's not a blackberry? Incredible!

6. The media player. An intuitive interface for playing or manipulating playing songs? And iTunes! Crap as it may be in today's eyes, it was so much better than the crud that came bundled with other phones at the time.

7. The microphone, volume controls and phone answering.

8. The 'silent' mode switch. Faffing around through about 10 actions to turn on silent mode? No more, one tactile feedback switch with the added bonus that you can run your thumb over it in your pocket to see if silent mode is on.

9. The synch just worked. You just plugged it in and it worked. In the 3 or 4 years that the other manufacturers had computer tie-in they'd managed to produce every conceivable piece of rubbish synching software you could imagine. The iPhone was the first phone I saw anyone actually bother to synch with their computer.

10. The wi-fi. It has wifi? No way. And it just works? Not 20 minutes fiddling, it just worked. And it did amazingly smart things like use the wifi for email and browsing when you were near a known network. This. Is. Amazing. The reason it had this incredible feature was because it had a mobile browser that would have caned your mobile data plan which were restrictive to say the least. Other phones didn't have wifi connections.

The list is much, much longer than this. There's just so many little tweaks and incredible modifications they made to how a mobile phone should operate that beggar belief that anyone would claim it's just a 'step', it was a gigantic leap.

Phone manufacturers were total failures when it came to the actual software for their phones. Total and utter failures. They couldn't do it! The UX was always horrific. The iPhone changed that permanently.

It reinvented usable mobile phones. Before that everyone just used a tiny subset of the capabilities because they were so god-damn complicated.

And Android took it all. Copied it. This is what Android looked like when the iPhone came out, it looked like every other phone on the market, a terrible UX, with absolutely no vision:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg

I've said before, credit where due to the android team for changing direction so fast and so well, but they lifted that OS from Apple, no doubt in my mind.

NB: I'm not an Apple fanboi, I only have an iPhone. But to dismiss the iPhone as a 'step' is absurd to me.