[ascii_only]

Is that sarcasm, because I had cheap Symbian 40 phone with Opera mobile way before iPhone was announced. Browser that i used everywhere. And this Symbian phones were majority of the market. Also Windows mobile phones that only geeks were using at the time also had browser and also way before iPhone.

[keymone]

Did you forget large touchscreen, no physical buttons and no need for stylus?

Of course other phones had browsers, they were just pain to use and iPhone was revolutionary device compared to even most feature rich flagship device. It’s an opinion you may disagree with, but you’re in minority.

[ascii_only]

I don't argue that iPhone was revolutionary although I think it was way less revolutionary than average consumer thinks. I argue with very specific claim. OP have claimed that "being able to use a browser anywhere was the killer feature" and it is just not true because most of the market could do it. All symbian, blackberry and Windows Mobile phones could do it.

>Did you forget large touchscreen, no physical buttons and no need for stylus?

iPhones did have physical home button and O2 XDA II from 2003 has the same touchscreens size as original iPhone. Also you are forgetting that first capacitive touchscreens were awful. Qwerty keyboard or resistive touchscreen were just nicer to use. And you didn't have to use stylus. Most people who I know used stylus in few very specific applications and they just use finger for most tasks but to be fair you had to be very precise.

[scarface74]

The Opera browser at the time for mobile weren’t full browsers. They rendered on a server and had limitations.

[milankragujevic]

No, that was Opera Mini J2ME. Symbian's Opera mobile was based on Presto and rendered and executed JS on the device. It could optionally compress images and JS with Opera Turbo.

[robin_reala]

No, that was Opera Mini. Opera Mobile was a full browser using Presto, and ran on a bunch of platforms including Symbian, Windows Mobile and Maemo.

[kccqzy]

The web at that time didn't need full browsers to be enjoyable. Most websites were like what Hacker News is right now: just simple HTML, little to no JavaScript, and easy on bandwidth.

[scarface74]

By 2005, Flash was ubiquitous and one of the knocks against the iPhone in 2007 was that it couldn’t run Flash. Plug ins were ubiquitous and bloated MySpace pages and Geocities was a thing.

Home broadband adoption was already 40% (https://www.pewinternet.org/2006/05/28/home-broadband-adopti...)