&gt; The reality at the time was to my mind looking really bad. WAP<p><i>shudders</i> I worked in that space right around the time the iPhone landed, WAP was way beyond looking really bad, it was an unmitigated disaster, it was horror.<p>&gt; The fact that Apple forced the carriers to allow an open mobile internet was utterly shocking to me - in a good way.<p>To be fair, high-end nokia did already have &quot;open mobile internet&quot; available. Technically anyway: compatibility was a craspshoot and the experience was terrible, I had an E70 with a relatively competent webkit-based browser (IIRC), it did technically render pages but:<p>* very small screen, making interacting with pages difficult (mobile-adapted pages were <i>not</i> a thing, and the browser didn&#x27;t do much adaptation)<p>* arrows moving a small cursor around on a small unzoomed page made for a terrible experience<p>* device lacked both CPU and (especially) RAM, interactions would be very slow and browser would regularly crash and OOM<p>* flash was still very present, the device didn&#x27;t handle it at all, it didn&#x27;t cope that well with javascript either<p>After it was released Opera Mini did help with the resources side (but not UI and compatibility). Anyway my point is, open mobile internet was available before the iphone, it was just an utter wreck of an experience (though still not as bad as WAP)