Apples or rather jobs main contribution to the rise of the smartphones was that he convinced the providers to allow mobile data at prices that were merely very expensive instead of astronomical like before. 
The other innovation that accelerated the emergence of smartphones tremendously was the realization that resistive touch screens are crap and won&#x27;t ever get good enough for comfortable touch control. 
That pretty much made better on screen keyboards possible. Also i want to point out that the 1st gen iPhone was pretty much limited in what it could do initially - Apple got completely surprised by the magnitude of interest in mobile apps and games.