I'm probably younger than you think I am. The iPhone launched into the public eye about the time I had launched into adolescence but I didn't purchase my own until several years later. I just happen to have an interest in older tech and, while retrocomputing contributed has to the appreciation of former dream computers like Amigas, Ataris, Quadro Macs, and SGI workstations, it seems to have elided the more recent history of cell phone software. A history I had been a participant in but one unaware at the time of how the sausage was being made. It wasn't until several years later, after bearing the brunt of the Lumia's slow death, did I travel down the rabbit hole of phone OSes and the hardly remembered Flash-lite and J2ME games of my teen years.

1997-2007 was for mobile phones what the '60s were for mainframes, the '70s for minicomputers, the '80s for microcomputers, and (much to the dismay of IBM, Apple, et al.) the '90's for Windows PCs and video games as a whole: an inventive period of try-everything-at-least-once that can't really be recaptured. It led to all sorts of trends, some functional, some crazy (especially the Galapagos phones in Japan), some that stuck around, and some that will remain unique to the era. It's kind of disappointing to see how much of that development history is now quite difficult to rediscover and catalog. And it will be all the more difficult as time goes on. I'm just fortunate to have caught your attention when I did. You're the first person I've heard from who has first-hand experience of the backend of the cellphone industry during it's heyday.