Everyone stands on the shoulders of those who came before. Furthermore if you have a good idea the odds are extremely high that someone else has had the same idea. &quot;Inventions&quot; are almost never worth the name. Things generally follow a natural progression (at least in technology):<p>1. Some wild-eyed visionaries (sometimes from academia) come up with crazy visions of what computing might be like in the future. This vision is usually highly impractical, requiring vastly more compute power or vastly cheaper components than exist. Further the software is the quality you&#x27;d expect from academic professors (garbage) and barely works for a few minor demos. This is the pre-prototype phase.<p>2. Someone brings a more realistic version to market. Sometimes the first to market fails badly because they arrive too soon. The product is too limited or the market isn&#x27;t ready yet.<p>3. Finally someone brings a version of the invention to market that is a sellable product.<p>What matters is execution.<p>Ericsson had a touch screen phone? So what. In high-school in the late 90s I had a PocketPC predating the Ericsson phone; it was fucking obvious back then that they&#x27;d add a cellular radio to it as soon as it became practical (I know, I carried a Windows Mobile phone for a while). They were all garbage. They took no risks. They didn&#x27;t have the animation or feedback systems that made iOS so pleasant to use. None of them even pretended to offer a real web browser - it was WAP if anything. Everything before the iPhone was qualitatively and quantitatively inferior, even if it happened to have a janky plastic touch screen. They sure as hell weren&#x27;t running slimmed down desktop operating systems with fully-featured frameworks. They ran whatever software your carrier deigned to offer at vastly inflated prices.<p>There&#x27;s a good reason the engineers at Blackberry thought the iPhone was a faked demo. There&#x27;s a good reason Apple waltz in and completely upended and transformed the cellular industry.<p>Of course this all ignores that Apple had the Newton because it doesn&#x27;t matter who had something first. It matters who can productize that thing and sell it to customers for money.