What made smartphone popular were the changing times. If you look back in time you see how it grew.
This is a link to 10 years of Blackberry history but in there it shows how smart phone grew. Each step in the market looks very logical. Things were taking off before than iPhone came out. Just the iPhone came out about the time they really were going to take off. iPhone did not make them popular. As it has been pointed out before if the iPhone did it would be number 1 in the smart phone market. It is no were close to that. It is 3rd world wide and in the US it is getting getting creamed by the blackberry. No way around that argument.
Come on if the iPhone is what made smart phone so popular then why is it sitting in 3rd world wide and a very distance 2nd place in the US?
As for the portable mp3 player popular I say it was the mp3. lets look back at that time. Napster had really taken off. Downloading mp3s was getting huge. I remember using napter and I was lucky to see 500 people online. In a matter of months that 500 grew to over 10k per server. That should tell you something.
Also back then people started ripping their cds and people wanted ways to take it with them so mp3 players were growing in popular . the iPod was not the first mp3 player or even the first hard-drive based mp3 player. I also believe when the iPod first came out it did struggled as well as the market had not taken off then it just explode and all the player had huge growth.
Thats your theory but I disagree.
The iphone OS, web browser, itunes integration, ease of use, touch screen and many other features is what pushed the smartphone business to what it is today.
I remember seeing or hearing about some smartphones but they were so clunky, big, hard to use, with many os issues, tons of menus within submenus that people couldnt and actually wouldnt want to use unless they needed to because of their jobs. You had to be programmer to figure out every single feature on them and they looked so old and outdated, worst than windows 3.1
But since the iphone release the smartphone market took off like crazy. Now it seems like every phone out there has a touchscreen or pushing for an appstore similar to Apples and with itunes integration wether thats thru 3rd party programs or thru hacks like the Pre did
Now people that never used a smartphone before can pick up an iphone and figure it out without having to read an 80 page manual and actually enjoy using it instead.
Also same thing about the ipod. Offcourse there was other mp3 players before it but nothing close to the success it had. People were using 10 and 12 disk cd changers in their cars and also MP3 cd players that would play a data cd loaded with mp3's.
Those 2 products changed the game and then everyone else followed or tryed to follow their success.
