You could arguably say that early attempts anchored the industry (into a certain way of thinking about what a smartphone was and how it worked) until Apple came along to pull it out of that rut...
That's arguable. I'm pretty sure there are many more ways to 'do it' which are both wrong, and have not been attempted.
Granted, I'm not putting Apple up on a pedestal or anything. They just came along at the right time, with the right leadership to combine existing technology into a better (and more useful) configuration.
And there may need to be someone in Apple's position in the future. Will it be Apple? Maybe, maybe not. It didn't take Apple to change smartphones for the better, it took a better smartphone that Apple was the first (by a long shot) to realize.
Even though early smartphones sucked in comparison to modern smartphones, I wouldn't trade that development for the world. Bring on the smartglasses.
