Agreed. And then again: which problem did the iPhone solve exactly?
Just the original phone solved voicemail (with visual voicemail) once and for all in one fell swoop. It was just echelons better.
That part of the initial demo still continues to blow my mind. https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?t=29m30s
Here’s the original introduction to the iphone: https://youtu.be/MnrJzXM7a6o?t=1m23s
It focused on a specific niche in a specific age group in a single country, which led to it expanding exponentially to 100M users in half a year there. Growing after that is a completely different story and not what's being discussed here.