I mean... if you're playing that kind of naive equivalency then the first "smartphones" were the early PDA/Phone hybrids like the HP OmniGo 700LX, the pdQ, or the Nokia 9000 Communicator.

But that would be silly, because the modern "smartphone" era was absolutely started with the iPhone.

You misunderstand. My answer was to refute that the innovation in smartphones came about with the iPhone and not the LG Prada which was released the year prior, market penetration notwithstanding. I was talking about smartphones in the vein of the iPhone not of the technology that could be assembled to make a phone.

HP OmniGo 700LX, pdQ, and Nokia 9000 Communicator didn't have touchscreens and were like night and day compared to either the Prada or iPhone. You are comparing apples to oranges.

Nothing in the LG Prada was innovative - it's design was that of PDAs from a decade before. It's touchscreen did nothing that previous models hadn't.

Was it a nice industrial design? Yes. Wasn't very original though (and neither was the iPhone's).

You're also shifting the goalposts - you said smartphone, not "had a touchscreen". It was the first capacitive touchscreen but not even close to the first touchscreen btw. The IBM Simon in 1992 likely takes that win.

What the iPhone did that was innovative was in how it improved upon and combined the technology. It also pushed forward a lot of things in those technologies by several large leaps.

Long story short - the LG Prada is superficially visually similar to an iPhone and, likewise, bringing it up shows a very superficial understanding of the history of the mobile phone space.

Touchscreen was simple hardware it does not make a smartphone any more than a Camera or Internet connection does. There where 3 major gaps, gestures, native apps w/App Store, and a web browser capable enough to run 'Web 2.0' apps. And while not a direct phone feature an internet plan with useful bandwidth caps for regular browsing which also a major jump in how you used them.

Android, Windows phone, and iPhone all added these core features.

I dunno. The LG Prada deserved credit for being the first (mainstream?) phone with a capacitive touchscreen, but I think if you're really looking for a spiritual predecessor to the iPhone, so to speak, then -- assuming you don't allow PDAs with phone functionality, like Handspring's line -- the Danger Hiptop, a/k/a T-Mobile Sidekick, is probably much closer. The Prada looks much more like an iPhone but the Hiptop/Sidekick had visual voicemail, one of the best mobile web browsers on the market[1], and an on-device app store. It doesn't get nearly enough credit for the trailblazing it did.

[1] The Hiptop used server-side rewriting of web sites to adapt them to its screen. This seems bananas now, but remember, the web was less than a decade old, and the notion of "responsive design" was years in the future. Back then, most other phones were stuck with WML.

LG Proda had a capactive touchscreen, but it failed to use it. You simply pressed virtual buttons instead of using gestures. Pinch to zoom might not seem like a big deal but it's something that iPhone got right and everyone copied.

Another issue is LG Proda stuck with J2ME instead of offering native apps.

So, the Proda was close, but it really missed the mark. IMO, the fact it took 4 years to after the hardware was possible before the iPHone showed up shows how significant the innovation actually was.

"Smartphone" was coined as a marketing term by Microsoft in the early 2000s to refer to PDAs with cell radios that ran Windows CE. These early smartphones were bricks -- not Zack Morris phones, but hand-sized bricks nonetheless -- and required a stylus to operate.

Yes. That was the point. However, you are forgetting that the first "smartphone" with a _touchscreen_ was Simon made in 1992 by IBM. Even so, Simon wasn't in the vein of the iPhone, which is really what this discussion is about, not marketing terms.