[fpgeek]

Perhaps, you've heard of the obscure little Taiwanese company that built the O2 XDA (the first device to merge a Pocket PC PDA (e.g. iPaq) and a mobile phone with Internet access)?

I believe they're called HTC. They've built tons of phones that resemble an iPaq, plenty of them before the iPhone was launched.

[MrScruff]

I'm not sure what point you're making. There were plenty of smartphones that existed before the iPhone. Many of them had icons and some had touch screens. None of them resembled the iPhone in 2007 any more than they resembled the Newton or Palm OS though.