> They literally invented smart phones iPhone was announced in January 2007 and shipped in June 2007. Windows Mobile literally had a version called "Smartphon

> They literally invented smart phones iPhone was announced in January 2007 and shipped in June 2007. Windows Mobile literally had a version called "Smartphone 2002" which you should be able to guess when that came out. You could buy a variety of devices in a vertical mostly-screen format running Windows Mobile for years before iPhone was even getting hinted at. The main thing the original iPhone did for the smartphone market is popularizing capacitive multitouch screens that work well without a stylus. > and app stores The iPhone not only launched without an app store, Apple (and Jobs in particular) was famously hostile to the idea of even supporting third party native apps at all, insisting that web apps would be all that the platform needed. They didn't change their tune until October 2007 when they announced an upcoming SDK, it was made available to developers in March 2008, and it wasn't actually released to users until July 2008. One could make an argument for Linux package managers being an "app store" in the mid-90s, though if you insist on it needing to sell commercial software then the various carrier-specific software platforms for J2ME feature phones starting in the '99-00 timeframe would be it. Carrier-agnostic third-party stores started to pop up a few years later, and the first official one from a phone vendor seems to have been Nokia Catalogs for Symbian S60 in 2006. Android also had an app store from the beginning, but the launch of the whole platform was delayed long enough that Apple managed to get iOS 2.0 out with its app store before the first Android devices actually shipped.