It's just that consumers wanted the big screen over everything else.
N95 photos still look decent even by today's standards, the original iPhone was a potato in comparison.
* 5MP camera with an amazing lens and dedicated shutter button
* 8GB(?) of flash and dedicated music controls
* Internet Hotspot
* Copy and paste (zing!)
I loved it then and yet I was still awful at making use of its potential.
Everyone has their silo'ed version of SIP plus a few extra features resold & repackaged as something unique and new to the market.
Trying to use the browser on the N95 was difficult it was slow to load pages and the reformatting was barely usable most of the time. Everything was high latency even on wifi.
With the iPhone it didn't really reformat websites so much as allow you to render it normally and then zoom and centre on to the bit you wanted to read. This was pre-responsive web design so everything stayed roughly the same as a desktop screen layout.
That and the multi-touch screen were the bits that made it superior enough for me to swap by the time the iPhone 3G came out.