Maybe not directly, but there was a demand for "portable computers", a better input system for phones, better portable cameras, a way to readily access the internet anywhere, among several other things. The smartphone became popular so quickly because it concretized all of those latent demands into a single device.
Exactly this. If a company can show me a phone that can do something new that my current phone can't-- not just a marginally better camera or invasive AI assistant-- then I would say to them "I still wish you would have spent your resources on dog longevity, but yeah maybe I'd be into that."
An iPhone isn't a flip phone but better... It's a whole different thing.
Why do people believe this shit? Like the Internet was around. You can go see me arguing with people calling my Nokia NGage a taco and me defending having to hold it weird if I get to play Tomb Raider on my phone, on forums, right now. Oh and the kids all hold their phones that way now and yes it looks stupid but they just remastered Tomb Raider for mobile so who cares.
What? Before the iPhone Palm and RIM were improving their smartphones constantly, new feature phones were coming out all the time with apps to access social media, the internet and play games. I think a lot of people actually were often wanting a better phone especially because all the phone mentioned above had terrible touchscreens.
Yeah but who was using those besides business folks. I think the thing with the iphone was the easy to use which made it more of a mass market thing. Granted they had the advantage of the ipod and a group they could sorta get to cross over.