Why do people keep saying Steve Jobs invented the iPhone? He at best could have pushed people to do the best but that alone should not let him steal all the credit.
I know because I worked directly with all ~33 pocketPC devices that existed at the time for my work.
The iPhone success doesn't happen without the boldness to radically defy industry norms.
And I say this as a Linux maximalist whose daily driver phone has been uninterrupted from G1 to modern day nexus, galaxy, and pixel only. The iPhone changed the meta, when no one else could.
There were buttonless attempts by pocketPC makers, but without the holistic software vision Steve had they didn't work.
It was Steve jobs that pushed it trough into a product.