Arguably, the original iPhone was the original phablet.
Arguably not. Larger touch screen phones with higher resolution had been around for years before the 2007 iPhone's 3.5" 320x480 half VGA display. For example:
It's like when people claim that the iPhone was the first with a "retina" display in 2010, but other phone makers had already passed 300 PPI back in mid 2007.
(Note: the Nexio was considered more a handheld tablet than smartphone, but it could make phone calls.)
About all you can say is that years after the original iPhone was launched, Samsung developed phones with larger screens.
True, Samsung did not invent the phablet. They only helped popularize them.
However, Apple doesn't get to use the "it's a natural progression" card for changing tablet and phone display sizes like everyone else, because they had publicly dissed any other sizes than their own.
Heck, two of its CEOs had stated that Apple had chosen the correct screen size for a particular device type, and that any other size would require human mods like sandpapered fingers. This surely came as a surprise to all us later iPad mini owners
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