It actually was. The smartphone market was well established but mostly business oriented. The iphone took smartphones to the consumer market by making it geared more toward multimedia. Despite Apple's claim it wasn't innovative at all, phones had been out for a few years already which could do everything the iphone did but they just weren't marketed that way so not many people bought them other than corporate types so they could have their e-mail on the go. I had a touchscreen in 1999, was playing mp3's through a cassette adapter, etc,.