If you describe the iPhone this way, it sounds as if the iPhone was a mediocre device. But you have to see it in comparison to the smartphones that were on sale in 2006. There was AFAIR no device with such a screen and such small bezels (those didn’t even were important at the time). And the idea of just a single home button and nothing else was very innovative at a time, when most phones had full numpads.
The camera was bad even for its time though. There were cheap phones with much better cameras.
I believe the LG Prada was the first phone with a Capacitive Touch screen, but yeah in terms of the iPhones design overall it was very unique and INCREDIBLY bold with it’s one button, it looked insane actually, it’s crazy to think what the smartphone world was in 2006/2007 and then what it quickly changed to between 2008-present, those late 2000s and early 2010s were especially a wild time in Smartphones, lol!
When the iPhone was announced I was using a Nokia N80, Symbian S60 OS based smartphone with T9 keypad that I was super fast on typing with, and I honestly didn’t believe the iPhone would make it ??? I think there is plenty of post history under my name, of me not at all convinced by iPhone in a number of forums including this one.
The iPhone really flipped everything on its head, suddenly you are driving the entire UI with your finger/thumb, that was absolutely unheard of in mobile at the time, it seemed so unrealistic, but this was due to the subpar experience devices that were around then had. Anytime Smartphones brought a new big feature in the 2000s the feature would be half baked and also somewhat cumbersome, there had not been a manufacturer who was as consistent as Apple is in on BOTH Hardware and Software, so we had never seen such a high level of commitment to something so different and revolutionary.
Back then a smartphone needed to have buttons to compensate either for lack of touchscreen (Symbian S60), or poor touch experience (Most touch phones were using resistive screens with a poorly optimized touch experience and UI mostly driven by button or jog dial navigation) this applies to Symbian UIQ, Windows Mobile and Linux Mobile (Motorola had many of these at the time) devices, these devices all had multiple layers of fallback/redundancy to cover up areas where the manufacturers had not fully committed to fixing/improving. Of course Email on phones was also becoming huge back then so a physical keyboard that is great in terms of size and tactility was #1 priority, the iPhone design threw the middle finger at all that, lol. Now here we are 15 years later typing away on iPhones that have completely eliminated that oh so loved Home button, incredible.