While large capacitive touchscreens are now commonplace, the smartphone landscape in 2007 was markedly different. At the time, RIM's BlackBerry devices were extremely popular and any smartphone worth its salt came with a tactile keyboard.

At a time when most smartphone browsers provided users with a dumbed down browsing experience, Forstall and his team wanted to enable users to access the entire Internet as it was meant to be viewed, sans Flash support of course.

That's not entirely true either. Plenty of PDAs and smart phones had decent browsers. Some of which even supported Flash.

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At a time when most smartphone browsers provided users with a dumbed down browsing experience, Forstall and his team wanted to enable users to access the entire Internet as it was meant to be viewed, sans Flash support of course.

The piece that the osnews article linsk to is an advertisement in disguise.

It is ahistorical in the sense that it disregards the real path that led to the current smartphone and the many designs that existed prior to Apple starting work on the iPhone. In other words, the article is just one more attempt to rewrite history so that the public can continue to believe in the "apple innovation" story.

Why? Because Apple now represents a significant share of the US´s GDP and a cash-cow must be protected at all costs.

What actually came out of the trial is how many other companies had prior art for every little thing that Apple claims to have invented and how many other phones existed that looked and behaved much like what would become the iphone.

I'm in no way trying to be nasty or sarcastic, because I respect you, but which PDAs/smart phones had decent browsers?

This is an honest question out of curiosity, because I've had to deal with a number of mobile devices that could browse and this was never a pleasant experience.