The first palm pilot was around 10 years before the iPhone, but despite the similarities we had flip phones, screen+keyboards, flipout keyboards, etc. It really took the iPhone nailing it to bring us the generation we have now of rectangle you can touch.
The use of glass as opposed to plastic was also critical in my opinion
> In other famous cases, Jobs’ exacting demands won out, to the eventual benefit of the final product. The screen of the phone was originally supposed to be composed of the same plastic that iPod screens were made of. But after a day in Jobs’ pocket, the prototype unit suffered from deep and permanent scratches thanks to his car keys. On a dime, Jobs switched the screen from plastic to Gorilla glass, even talking Corning into converting an entire factory in Harrisburg, Kentucky to produce the quantities Apple needed. This actually complicated things for the hardware team, since the multitouch sensors now had to be embedded in glass, and glass was an entirely different proposition from embedding in plastic.
