Have to disagree here. There were many devices before (and after) the iPhone that offered this package but it stands above the rest because of its design and polish.
And most of the discussion I had with the owner wasn't about how it was "all-in-one package", but rather how much smoother the UI was compared to other touch devices at the time, how accurate it was and how it felt in the hand.
Maybe depends on the country but 00's in Sweden on the internet was OK, lots of social places and other nerdery going on that was easy to get into, granted you had an internet connection. LunarStorm (originally "Stajlplajs" I think) must have been popular around 2002 already, and I remember that from my teenage age group, most of them were signed up to Lunarstorm, even though most of us were still on modems, 240p webcams and white/yellow desktop computers.
You could run things like IRC clients, dedicated text chat apps, and server rendered browsers on live Internet. But downloading full webpages was too much for the hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
> Building on Openwave's HDML, Nokia's "Tagged Text Markup Language" (TTML) and Ericsson's proprietary markup language for mobile content, the WAP Forum created the WML 1.1 standard in 1998. WML 2.0 was specified in 2001, but has not been widely adopted. It was an attempt at bridging WML and XHTML Basic before the WAP 2.0 spec was finalized. In the end, XHTML Mobile Profile became the markup language used in WAP 2.0.
But even Sony Ericsson phones way before the iPhone could all do those things in one phone too, some of them really good for their time. Yet they never kind of changed the technology scene as much as the iPhone.
It did. Jobs famously said on stage [0] "An iPod, a Phone, and an Internet Communicator. An iPod, a Phone... are you getting it? These are not 3 seperate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone" at the launch. It also did come with maps that used Google Maps.
It did web browsing very well.
And it came with Maps (which, at that time, used Google's data).
It was initially amusing back then when the world was commonly filled with wide-open 802.11 networks to pull out that little pocket computer, connect to a nearby network (if it hadn't already connected to "Linksys"), and browse an online map -- from about anywhere with a building nearby.
Wifi-based geolocation was also spooky-good at that time.
Anyway, it didn't do much else that I found useful. It was generally lacking features that I'd been using for years with a Handspring Visor (which itself ran on a pair of alkaline batteries for months).
Early IOS didn't even have a clipboard to cut and paste with.
So I jailbroke it. I added multitasking, an app "store," a clipboard and a bunch of other fun stuff long before Apple allowed those functions.
I think I even had a good bit of the Debian userland installed at one point.
After that, I used it all the time for stuff (until the OG Motorola Droid replaced it in 2009, which was easy as pie to root: just dump a special su on there and run it).
The iPhone felt more like a general portable computing device that happened to also function as a phone.
Even the Blackberry up to that point still felt more like an "email/phone device" primarily (though funny enough, I never had a Blackberry myself until after the iPhone came out).
The irony now, and I suspect many people are like this, is my "phone" is barely ever used as an actual phone. It's a computer with a data plan. I am way more likely to use some kind of internet-based voice/video chat than make or take a phone call.
My phone icon is still on my home screen, but only because it is something I want to be able to get at quickly in an emergency. I'm certain it's the least-used icon on the screen, though.
There were also other “phones” that only had the phone function as one of many apps.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, compared to Safari on the iPhone. It was in a league of its own. It was dog-slow over Edge but it was a _real_ browser instead of what had come before.
It's the usefullness, not the hardware.
The apps were worse, but you had that HUGE screen to look at. And compared to other non-blackberry phones where you were limited to T9 text input, it was a game changer.