That is like saying Apple (iPhones) are a threat to Google (Android) when it was Apple that first brought touch-based smartphones to market.
Palm and Microsoft (through OEMs) both released touch-based smartphones years before the iPhone. They were very popular in the military, government, and legal markets, though a distant #2 and #3 to Blackberry (which did not release a touch-capable device until after the iPhone).
Do you have links to back up your claim? Palm's first touch screen smartphone effort was released in 2009 [0]. Not that it matters considering the original discussion was Google vs Apple.
Anyway, PDAs were a different device category from smartphones and many of them required a stylus for input like the HP iPAQ which ran Windows Pocket PC.
IIRC, the iPhone keynote talked about how they did away with the stylus because people frequently lost them so I wouldn't equate stylus-input PDAs with finger-input smartphones even though both device categories technically use touch-screens.
That’s a silly question since it predates most of those operating system it was a smartphone it’s like saying that the iPhone didn’t run a mainstream operating system same goes for Android which is true when they came out they weren’t mainstream Symbian was the closest thing to mainstream at the time.
Palm and Microsoft (through OEMs) both released touch-based smartphones years before the iPhone. They were very popular in the military, government, and legal markets, though a distant #2 and #3 to Blackberry (which did not release a touch-capable device until after the iPhone).