[jwebb99]

> They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did. It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.

The iPhone is synonymous with smartphone technology because its debut was a quantum leap ahead of the competition at the time (Blackberry, Palm, etc.). Google was working on a phone that used a physical keyboard until they saw the iPhone announcement and then quickly modified Android to ape iPhone/iOS.

I'm really sick of people trying to downplay Apple's innovations as nothing more than slick packaging and marketing. It's a stupid meme that refuses to die.

[kybernetikos]

As far as I know, there were two new things that came along with the iphone: multitouch capacitive screen and 3g data plans that were actually worth using because apple threw their weight behind negotiating with the carriers. A few generations later, the iphone app store was a huge achievement too. All of those were huge, but there are also a lot of other innovations associated with the iphone that were actually around years before.