I don't think it's fair to say the iphone form factor wasn't out there. There was a rich variety of full-screen touch or pen phones (palm, pocket pc, some one-o

I don't think it's fair to say the iphone form factor wasn't out there. There was a rich variety of full-screen touch or pen phones (palm, pocket pc, some one-off designs like the lg prada), and there were models designed with a capacitive screen. A lot of people were trying to corner the smartphone market by foregoing a physical keyboard. I still think palm's graffiti was a better way of inputing complex text than any smartphone on-screen keyboard. It's not that nobody was trying to figure out how to build a smartphone with a big touchscreen, just that they were approaching it from the enterprise space. Usability wasn't important because it wasn't an enterprise selling point. Pen input was important because signature input was key for enterprise. Apple ignored enterprise at first and designed for the consumer market, which allowed for blasphemies like throwing out pen support. The big change was making smartphones a consumer product instead of an enterprise product.