The Treo 180 was released in 2002. You connected to the internet by essentially dialing a modem over the cell phone network. It had a built in web browser.
And GPRS showed up in 2000/2001 and was arguably the real beginning of mobile data.
My 2007 Nokia N95 was in many ways way ahead of the 2008 iPhone with a 5mp camera (zeiss), front-facing camera, video calling, MMS, 3.5" headphone jacket, cut&paste "technology", GPS, FM radio, Adobe Flash support (gasp), 8GB storage, and many more things. I was streaming live footage online with Qik and uploading videos to YouTube while the iPhone couldn't even record video! It took Apple several years to catch up with some of these features. This phone was a beast but the only thing it didn't have was a great UI/UX.
So yes, the iPhone doesn't even come close to the birth of the smartphone, but it did a whole lot to make it main stream.
This is why I said "modern smartphone". The windows mobile phones were always a niche product for tech-savvy people and the blackberry was always highly optimized for people who cared about being able to access email 24/7 for business reasons.
Opera mini existed for years before the iphone, and it's what gets used to browse the web on slow networks. I used to run it on a low end j2me phone in 2006, and it browsed the web just fine. I think "the modern smartphone" more than anything is a change in perception of what is possible, no an actual meaningful increase in what is possible.
The Treo 180 was released in 2002. You connected to the internet by essentially dialing a modem over the cell phone network. It had a built in web browser.
And GPRS showed up in 2000/2001 and was arguably the real beginning of mobile data.