You wouldn't even need to put a bunch of geniuses in a room together for an afternoon. All you would have to do is get a team to watch any episode of Star Trek:TNG and create something like the slates the Enterprise crew used.
But the thing is, if the hardware components and UI skills existed, why wasn't anyone able to do it in the past?
I think the answer is that on the manufacturer side, nobody cared about end-users, and the nature of the business was that the carriers dictated a lot about what went into a phone.
So with the iPhone, here comes Apple, managing to get a carrier to play Apple's game, and saying "take our phone and its UX or leave it".
So sure, you might have been able to get a bunch of geniuses to come up with such a phone, but you probably would have had no ability to get it on the market successfully, because you wouldn't have been able to get any carrier buy-in without the clout of a company that has sold millions upon millions of portable media devices like Apple.
Until Apple came around, phone manufacturers treated the carriers as the customers, not the end-users. So if you take it that context, I doubt that something like the iPhone was at all obvious to the HTCs, Samsungs and RIMs of the world.
I think it's even simpler. Only Apple had the supply chain to build an affordable device. Everyone else knew the outcome would be too expensive relative to the feature set.
I love my iPad, but there's no way I would pay $1500 for it. It's just not that good. Only Apple could build one at a competitive cost.
What flashback to 2007 would be complete without considering Flash?
Remember how the lack of Flash was the biggest strike against the iPhone/iOS platform? How it was a design flaw that would cripple the platform from gaining wide adoption?
Also, don't forget that the first iPhone got a $100+ (150?) price break after the first month. They had no idea how popular it was going to be. Not even Apple had appreciated exactly how much the market was waiting for a good touchscreen phone.
Samsung obviously is capable of making a device like the iphone and making it affordably, since they are the supply chain. The fact that they make all the parts, but were unable to put them together, says something about Samsung.
But the thing is, if the hardware components and UI skills existed, why wasn't anyone able to do it in the past?
I think the answer is that on the manufacturer side, nobody cared about end-users, and the nature of the business was that the carriers dictated a lot about what went into a phone.
So with the iPhone, here comes Apple, managing to get a carrier to play Apple's game, and saying "take our phone and its UX or leave it".
So sure, you might have been able to get a bunch of geniuses to come up with such a phone, but you probably would have had no ability to get it on the market successfully, because you wouldn't have been able to get any carrier buy-in without the clout of a company that has sold millions upon millions of portable media devices like Apple.
Until Apple came around, phone manufacturers treated the carriers as the customers, not the end-users. So if you take it that context, I doubt that something like the iPhone was at all obvious to the HTCs, Samsungs and RIMs of the world.