[ethanbond]

It's pretty apparent, really, that the iPhone was in no way inspired by the LG Prada, given that the iPhone was announced less than a month after the Prada was announced.

Maybe you could argue that all the slab devices were inspired by the Prada, despite the Prada 2 itself backing away from the form factor and adding a keyboard?

I didn't claim Apple doesn't steal features from others. In fact, Jobs himself has been very vocal about his feature theft.

My only argument is that the iPhone form factor, despite its dominance today, was never "obvious." The iPhone is what created a world in which it's nearly impossible to buy a phone outside of that form factor.

[cromwellian]

There were slab smartphones before the iPhone, arguably, they retained a lot of buttons (usually cursor keys, or 2-4 macro buttons, especially on models that had resistive touch). I've consistently been an early adopter of high tech smartphones and carried a few.

The iPhone didn't drive a flurry of copying of the slap concept because of it's slabbiness, it drove it because of it's features. Do you think the Blackberry's adoption was because of it's keyboard, or because of the addictive nature of push messaging in the crackberry's implementation?

An iPhone with a keyboard form factor, but with all of the other features it launched with, would have still dominated. The OS was radically advanced over Symbian, it had a much better screen, CPU, and just worked better. I had plenty of Symbian smartphones with Wifi, none of them could lock on as quickly as an iPhone or seamlessly switch.

The iPhone did everything right for a Smartphone, and created the demand that made it something non-geeks could use. This is what compelled everyone else to follow.

Go grab you iPhone 2007 model and compare it to today's iPhone 5/6/7, the designs don't match or feel the same at all.

Capacitive touch IMHO is the main advancement, not the overall industrial design.