[phire]

> I think the App Store resonated a lot more with people back then rather than the iPhone as a device

You are forgetting, there was no App Store when the iPhone launched. Apple was originally against the idea of Apps. The App Store launched a year later, with the iPhone3G. Yet the iPhone was wildly popular not just from the day it launched, but from the day Apple first demoed it.

I think what caught people's attention with the iPhone is that it's one of the first phones where you could easily browse websites from your phone in a way that didn't feel like a gimmick.

Other phones had web browsers, but they only really worked on special mobile versions of websites. They were also slow and painful to use even on those mobile optimised websites.

Then iPhone came along, and Apple had someone managed to squash a full desktop web browser on it. It did a half decent job of reformatting desktop-only websites to fit on the screen. When pages didn't reformat, the new touched-based panning and pinch-to-zoom gestures allowed you to still experience them with ease.

And Apple managed to make the whole OS feel responsive, despite using the exact same hardware as their competitors.