The iPhone was not a total revolution in phones the way you describe. They did not invent the touchscreen phone nor the smartphone. They improved them.
There were many not a few touchscreen phones before the iPhone, no multi-touch ones, and many crappy resistive screen phones that needed a sharp pointy thing to be kind of responsive.
Smartphones were just a niche before 2007 made them mainstream. The iPhone did to smartphones what the iPod did to digital music players, turning niche into norm.
Many phones at the time had web browsers, games, bluetooth support, played MP3s, et cetera. Look at the Motorola Razr as an example. They were smartphones.
> The iPhone was not a total revolution in phones the way you describe.
It was a revolution because it actually sold and was relevant to more than just a handful of high-end users. (I had phones with e-mail, web, and app capabilities prior to an iPhone, but those features were all just sideshows until the iPhone made them useful. The only use I can remember having for J2ME apps was to play Yahtzee on a Sanyo 4900.)
