> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?

It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.

> I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?

Feature phones ("dumbphones"), even ones with cameras or music player functionality, were and are extremely limited compared to smartphones like the Palm Treo, which was basically a pocket-sized, wireless internet-connected computer with a much larger, color screen, OS and GUI, installable apps, and a tiny (but usable) keyboard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo

Phones using DoCoMo's i-mode (which took off in Japan starting in 1999) were sort of a bridge between feature phones and smartphones. i-mode will finally shut down in 2026.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

Smartphones also generally looked very different pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.

> "What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties," DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."

https://www.engadget.com/2013-12-19-when-google-engineers-fi...