Those "smartphones" did not have anywhere near the capabilities that the iPhone engendered. They had only the ability to show a crippled internet, not a full webpage, touch capability was single sense and done by use of a stylus, screens were low resolution, and memory capacity was extremely limited, usually under 1GB or even smaller. Apple complete redefined the smartphone with the iPhone.
There was a complete demarkation in the design of cellular phones that is essentially those that were designed before the iPhone and those designed after the iPhone. Apple invented the modern multitouch interface for small devices. Apple holds those patents. They hold the patents on the gestures and license the to all the other smartphone makers. You can claim what you want to, but you are wrong to say that Apple did not define the modern smartphone category.
The first Android phone design was essentially going to be a rip-off of the Blackberry design:
The Original Android Phone Design Google canceled in 2007 to start over after seeing the iPhone
The first touch screen Android phones all had physical keyboards and came out almost a year and a half or more after the iPhone (First Android phone available was the T-Mobile G1 in September of 2008 and had only 256MB of Storage, relying on slow SD cards for further storage that could only store photos, the next Android phone was not available until July of 2009). When Android phones finally dropped their physical keyboards, they were plagued with latency problems in their virtual keyboard solutions due to their history of having to translate the screen inputs into physical keystrokes as though the still had a keyboard.
Other OS smartphones, such as Microsoft, Nokia, and RIM stuck with physical keyboards even longer, and still kept low capacity storage, and were essentially limited function feature phones. Some had more capabilities but were far from easy to use. The RIM Blackberry phones came with a user manual that was over 200 pages of complicated instructions on its use. Even the Motorola Razr had an extensive and complex instruction manual.
Apple was the first to really put a fully functional computer in a small package and add a phone to it. . . and made it easy to use.