> It's unquestionable that iPod unleashed the explosive miniaturization of technology, and paved the road for everything that we saw in the following decade with smartphones.
PDAs were being developed at the same time as the iPod and probably have a much better parental claim than the iPod. The first smartphones -- the ones before the iPhone -- were basically PDAs with cellular modems, and utilized the similar OSes as their non-modem-bearing predecessors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant
I had an HTC Wizard, specifically the Cingular 8100, which came out two years before the first iPhone.