And, to engage in some historical guesswork, if the iPod never happened, what would have happened to the iPhone and iPad? It's not that smartphones and tablets in some form never would have happened without the iPod, but it's hard for me to see Apple having a role.
The smartphone market got into gear with Palm (and Handspring, then Palm bought Handspring...) merging their PDAs with a cellphone.
If you don't recall PalmOS, the major user interface was a resistive touch screen (160x160 mono ranging up to 320x320 16K color) and a stylus, with no keyboard on most models. The keyboard lack was countered by a handwriting recognition system that took a very low-CPU power approach: Graffiti has its own gesture alphabet, which takes an hour or two to learn. By specifying the way every letter had to be drawn, and specifying where on the screen it would be recognized, a Motorola 68K was acceptable, and a 300MHz low-end ARM felt snappy.
PalmOS had a database format which lives on to this day as part of the Mobi ebook file spec.
It's likely that smartphones would have never escaped the enterprise (Blackberry, Palm, WinPho 6, etc.) if the iPhone hadn't been released. Apple always put music front and center in their presentation of the iPhone, for good reason.
I don't think so. I was starting to see Palm and Windows smartphones in the hands of consumers without especially advanced tech backgrounds a decade ago as well as the occasional Sidekick. Android was in development at the time as well, and while early prototypes don't seem nearly as consumer-friendly as iPhones, many early production models were similarly unimpressive.
It may have taken a bit longer, but I think the mainstream popularity of smartphones was inevitable.
>I think the mainstream popularity of smartphones was inevitable
I don't. I'm not a fan of Apple, but they really transformed our conception of a smartphone and made them a desirable device for the mass market. As I'm sure you know, early versions of Android looked nothing like it did once the iPhone was revealed. Even relatively modern smartphone platforms like WebOS completely failed to resonate with the public.
You're forgetting that Nokia (and a few others) managed to sell a few hundred million iPhone-uninfluenced Symbian devices before that platform was flattened by Android. That's plenty of evidence that the mass market already wanted smarter devices iPhone or no iPhone.
