Lots of companies were making smart phones with similar specs. Under Johnny Ive's management, the Apple version made a much bigger splash than any of them and defined the category.
At the time of the public debut of the first generation iPhone (January 2007), the statement "lots of companies were making smart phones with similar specs" is objectively false. Further, there were zero companies making comparable large touchscreen, large cpu phones outside of Apple at the time.
Arguably HP/Palm's WebOS devices were ahead on every mark - easier to use, more featureful, smarter, better physical design than any iPhone of similar manufacturing date.
The difference was management choosing to stick with a platform for long enough for network effects to kick in.
If Apple has any advantages compared to other big tech, it's an ability to look past next quarter's financials.
Palm offerings in 2007, such as the Treo 755p or the Centro, could not compete hardware-wise with the original iPhone. The claim that these Palm phones were "easier to use" is hilarious to me, and probably hilarious to many others.
I explicitly mentioned WebOS, meaning the devices released around 2009, which competed with 1st gen iPhone old stock, and directly against iPhone 3G - the second generation.
The first gen iPhone is not a smartphone by today's standards. No multitasking, no copy/paste, no centralized instant messaging, all things WebOS devices had on release.
Even the second generation of iPhones felt half baked by comparison.
Which just goes to illustrate my point, that they weren't technologically superior, just more committed.
The race was already over by the time webOS showed up. Even Microsoft, with a superior product and many billions spent pushing it, couldn't overcome the network effects of iOS and Android. No one else had a chance.