I worked at SE when the iPhone was released and that is not how I remember it. :) The mood was more like "lol, it has no buttons!", "too expensive!" and "it can't work without a stylus!" I think many seriously misjudged how "cool" Apple was back then (and consequently how much they'd be willing to spend on status symbols) and how good a snappy touch ui could be.
Did you work with Symbian/UIQ software, feature phone software or something else? The feature phone team actually showed signs of getting the idea of no-jank and a rich UI very early.
Lund working on feature phones! My job was writing and managing test suites for verifying the J2ME implementation. It was a top secret collaboration with Motorola. They took QA work extremely seriously and bugs could delay major launches. Unfortunately for them, "rock solid J2ME" wasn't really what customers were after. :)
(Nokia's also worked but was slow. Everyone else's implementations tended to be both broken and slow. A particular shoutout to Samsung - they must have had 6+ separate, broken implementations.)
The fact that they did J2ME multitasking on a feature phone better than Symbian S60 did multitasking of native apps, and did it before the iPhone got any form of multitasking at all always impressed me.
Not to pile on... but let me pile on: symbian seemed eternally bureaucratic, lost in OO abstraction hell and lacked enough demo scene people who knew that a solid 60/72 fps is what mattered.
People from Future Crew (Finland) and Triton (Sweden) should have been running these teams. Half ;-).
A lot of people made the same mistake. They didn't understand -- simply couldn't understand for some reason -- that the imperfect iPhone that was launched in 2007 was the worst one that would ever exist.
You see this attitude a lot today. ("AI? LOL, it can't even count the letters in 'Strawberry.'") People have a mental block when it comes to understanding that the value of something new doesn't matter as much as its time derivative.
