For those of us who were PDA users in the late 90s and Treo users in the early 2000s, the iPhone is an incremental improvement on those ideas.
The presence of ubiquitous wireless networking (I am lumping cellular wireless and WiFi in together) was the real game changer.
If you are not convinced, try this thought experiment: Imagine yourself in 1998 standing on the street in a major city holding a Palm pilot. It has an SDK, a TCP/IP stack and a POP email client. But no wireless connection.
Now add a wireless connection. Could you tweet or Facebook? Sure, if those things existed then.
The presence of ubiquitous wireless networking (I am lumping cellular wireless and WiFi in together) was the real game changer.
If you are not convinced, try this thought experiment: Imagine yourself in 1998 standing on the street in a major city holding a Palm pilot. It has an SDK, a TCP/IP stack and a POP email client. But no wireless connection.
Now add a wireless connection. Could you tweet or Facebook? Sure, if those things existed then.