I went from a Palm Treo to the iPhone in 2007, these devices were not in the same league. Years apart in all aspects. I had an external box for tomtom gps on the treo and a janky mp3 player and some crappy apps on a resistive touch screen that looked like it had a permanent hazy film over it as all resistive ones do.

The apps part was rectified pretty quickly but even the kind of halfway decent web apps available after iPhone launch beat treo apps.

I'm not an apple fanboy but they were the first to really understand and solve touch screen phones - they went with capacitive tech when everyone was doing resistive and they went all-in on the UX and studied how touch should feel and how the UI should reflect it.

They were by no means the first smartphone nor were they the first touch phone but the "iphone moment" was coined because they figured out how to make frontier tech mainstream.

They also weren't the first to make an MP3 player but it sure felt that way with the ipod. I don't know how people have rewritten this history in their minds

This is true, but I felt the same with the HTC Dream, although I guess Apple was first, they were more than a year apart. I don't miss typing 'reboot\n' in any app, or at any time, and the phone rebooting, because the first release had a left-open root session.

So the Android polish wasn't quite there on release either.