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If you go back and see the original launch of the ROKR, though, you can see Steve Jobs barely masking his disgust at what Motorola was able to come up with. IIRC the iPhone was well underway from a product dev perspective when the ROKR shipped, and he knew it was going to kill anything the phone makers could envision.

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I had a ROKR. I also had several windows mobile phones. I'd find it hard to believe that Jobs thought the ROKR was what he had to compete with; from a usability perspective, the iPhone didn't come close to windows mobile; it lacked even basic MMS functionality for quite a while.

There were shortcomings, but being able to browse the web and view full sites allowed you to do things with the iPhone in 2007 that were extremely useful. There was no other product like it in terms of usefulness for travel, shopping and general productivity.

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