History of Apple Inc.
The first version of the iPhone became publicly available on June 29, 2007 in selected countries/markets. It was another 12 months before the iPhone 3G became available on July 11, 2008. Apple announced the iPhone 3GS on June 8, 2009, along with plans to release it later in June, July, and August, starting with the U.S., Canada and major European countries on June 19. This 12-month iteration cycle has continued with the iPhone 4 model arriving in similar fashion in 2010, a Verizon model was released in February 2011, and a Sprint model in October 2011, shortly after Jobs' death.
Smartphone
In 2007, the LG Prada was the first mobile phone released with a large capacitive touchscreen. Later that year, Apple Computer introduced the iPhone. The iPhone was also designed around a large capacitive touchscreen, but added support for multi-touch gestures (for interactions such as "pinching" to zoom in and out on photos and web pages). Such phones were notable for abandoning the use of a stylus, keyboard, or keypad typical for smartphones at the time, in favor of a capacitive touchscreen for direct finger input as its only input type. The invention of the smartphone is often attributed to Apple, but they actually made the smartphone something mainstream due to the company's popularity in the US and they made popular the way that people interact with smartphones.