Who repackaged it first and made it into a product line?
If you mean what major company made it to market first with a capacitive screen and finger friendly UI, that's Apple. If you mean who was first to demo such ideas, that would not be Apple.
Who was responsible for the first App Store on a phone?
Palm maybe? Plus some carriers in Europe put the Handango Store app on their smartphones years before Apple did their own walled garden version.
In fact, most people consider the first iPhone to be a feature phone, not a smartphone, since it did not support native third party apps and was missing common apps such as a video cam or MMS.
Did any phone even have a proper Retina display at that time?
Yep, there were retina screens three years before the iPhone had one.
About the same time in mid 2007 that the first iPhone went on sale, Toshiba began selling their Protege smartphone with 310 ppi. There were also a couple of other non-smartphones with high resolution displays.
Who made the world's first proper touch focused device not requiring a stylus?
Was it the 1982
TRON desk? Or maybe the late 80s / early 90s control consoles and PADDs on
Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Actually, the
IBM Simon, the world's first smartphone back in 1993 (which incidentally was a touch phone) presented large enough buttons to be mostly used without a stylus. (Except the keyboard.) Btw, it also had an app store. Apple did not invent anything basically new about smartphones or touch devices. In fact, they had quite a historical template to use and improve.
Other smartphones between then and the iPhone also experimented with being finger friendly, including several very cool designs shown in 2006, which no doubt influenced Apple.
Samsung actually sold a finger-only touch phone in mid 2006... over a year before the iPhone went on sale:
A Linux phone with multi-touch capacitive screen and pinch zoom was even announced two months
before the iPhone:
![open_moko_gizmodo_jan.png]( "open_moko_gizmodo_jan.png")
For those and other reasons, industry insiders were not surprised by the iPhone.
But I'd say that the first really serious attempt at a finger friendly UI was the 2000 Norwegian FreePad. Nope, not a smartphone (although you could make calls and use it for faxes), but you did say "device".
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Like the iPad sold a decade later, its UI was created specifically to be touch friendly, and its core apps designed so that they would be "
so easy to use, that your grandmother can use it", as the FreePad's creators put it.
Its specs read just like an iPad would've back then... including having a dedicated app store.
The FreePad was even used in one of the first large scale USA textbook-on-tablet school tests back in 2003. (
USAToday - 5.15.2003) That old article reads like a current iPad article would.
Alas, it came out a few years too early, and not from a big name company.
Anyway, I guess the point is that Apple, with the Mac or iPod or iPhone or iPad, did not do truly breakthrough innovations on its own. Instead it took known concepts, then greatly refined and packaged them very attractively. This was Jobs' marketing forte.
