Nokia smartphones were already pretty big at the time iPhone was released, innovative thing was capacitive touch screen instead of resistive
so idea of smartphone was pretty safe bet, touchscreen was risky choice
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Seems to me like Apple also furnished, perhaps not immediately but very quickly, a much superior developer story than.. "Nokia's smartphone" did.
It was an entire year before third party apps were allowed. I think the first iPhone and its stock OS and built-in apps stood pretty well on their own compared to what was around. I recall getting an iPod Touch (the iPhone wasn't available in Australia until the 3G) and the Google Maps application (at that point written by Apple) and mobile Safari were just mind blowing for the time (remember that not only were capacitive touch screens rare at that point, multitouch was still just something most people had only seen in research videos if at all).