Comedy &quot;smartphone&quot; attempts?  I had a couple of smart phones before the iPhone came out and they offered several things it didn&#x27;t.  The fact that capacitive touchscreens and GPU acceleration weren&#x27;t as good yet doesn&#x27;t make them &quot;comedy attempts&quot;.  More like the incremental developments that provided the base which the iPhone was built upon.<p>Ignoring the fact that it&#x27;s all moot now, I was doing GPS navigation, multitasking, audio streaming, and rudimentary video calling on some of those &quot;comedy attempts&quot; from 2005-2007 and I did a lot of it with my fingers as well.  The iPhone improved on the touch aspect quite a bit but it&#x27;s not as if it wasn&#x27;t missing 10 other things that were common to smartphones of the time.<p>And that only makes sense.  It&#x27;s good business to focus on the things your competition isn&#x27;t doing as it allows you to target different parts of the market.