I had an N70. It was slow, slow, slow. I had a 5800. It was as slow as the N70 and the resistive screen made me want to cry. I never had the original iPhone but I guess it wasn't as bad.
You couldn't copy and paste text on an iPhone.
The camera was worse than any contemporary mid range camera phone.
Copy and paste didn’t work, but it didn’t work on any phone at the time. A few attempted it (eg, win mobile, blackberry) but it really sucked.
The camera was quite good and the ability to finally save and share photos and video was revolutionary at the time. I always thought it was funny how much it sucked at the time to try to store and send photos from my BlackJack or Blackberry.
In fact, the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch (2nd Gen) did not support multi-tasking either, even with iOS4. Apple noted performance issues.
Jail broken apps had multitasking like screen sharing, WiFi hot spotting and lots of other stuff.
It’s a big deal for an OS that doesn’t have multitasking vs doesn’t allow app developers to use.
It took Android phones many many years to even approach feeling as responsive and smooth and indicative of whether input has actually registered as the original iPhone, just scrolling through stuff and navigating around the OS. Tech at the time didn't even try on that front.
Featureless yes, but it could do enough to almost right away replace my iPod, Palm, and Nokia. One device instead of three was just too good to pass up.
Even the camera megapixel craze was being led by nokia. You're conflating the current dominance of the iphone for the past. At the time, the best thing about it was the finger only touch screen operation. To the best of my memory, others still needed to fall back to a stylus. Finger usage was a whackamole operation with Nseries and blackerry I used then
The simple act of making a call was so much easier and efficient, even though it lacked cut and paste.
Comparing it to feature phones is really curious because they were completely different markets. I don’t think it’s very useful in describing the iPhone’s success to point out individuals features that were also available in various existing phones.