iOS 1.0 also brought a few other apps and features that were important to the platform and ahead of their time:

Google Maps was shockingly better on the iPhone than it had been on any other platform. Apple fully utilized the new pinch-to-zoom functionality to make the app feel smooth and quick, but more importantly it felt more intuitive and natural to use than even desktop mapping software.

Visual voicemail was a clever trick that allowed users to jump directly to any voicemail without having to sit through endless voice prompts. It also showed off Apple's newfound ability to cut deals with carriers. Visual Voicemail was a signal that Apple, not the carrier, was to be the main provider the user experience.

iTunes Sync is another unappreciated feature today. Anybody who has struggled with Palm's HotSync or Microsoft's ActiveSync can appreciate that simple and reliable desktop syncing was hugely important. It was also an example of Apple's ability to take complicated features that had given other companies and users headaches and simplify them to the point of invisibility.

The software keyboard on iOS 1.0 was perhaps the first genuinely usable keyboard that could be typed on with your fingers. Yes, systems like PalmOS' Graffiti and 3rd-party extensions like FitalyStamp enabled text entry with a stylus, but iOS' paradigm of showing you the keyboard when you needed it and giving you more screen real estate for reading when you didn't was an important step forward for mass market smartphones.

I've spent quite a bit of time heaping praise on iOS 1.0 and it is well-deserved. Still, there were plenty of shortcomings. The largest was that iOS 1.0 offered no support for native, 3rd party apps. Apple tried to fill that gap by promoting web apps, but in 2007 HTML apps weren't ready to carry that load for the platform. Some (including yours truly) even argued that it may not even be technically correct to call the iPhone a smartphone, since it didn't offer a platform to develop against beyond the web browser. iOS 1.0 also only offered one form of multitasking to the user: playing iPod music in the background. Multitasking on other smartphone platforms wasn't a great experience, but it did work for many and the lack of it on iOS 1.0 was notable.

iOS 1.0 also introduced a new computing paradigm that broke from smartphone tradition: hiding the filesystem from the user. That design decision is still hotly debated to this day, but it did serve to simplify the device and make it more user-friendly. However, it could be said that the different layers of abstraction it sometimes requires can be off-putting (the inability to include an attachment in an email reply comes to mind). Other limitations, like the inability to change alert tones, were maddening if only because they were so easy to change on even the simplest feature phone.

Lastly, iOS 1.0 introduced Apple's "Springboard" homescreen. Hitting the home button always brought you to it, no matter where you were in the OS, presenting the user with a simple (but not yet re-arrangeable) grid of icons. Even now there is not any support for widget or other "ambient" information on that home screen — customizations that competitors like Windows Mobile and Symbian had long offered.

In a feature-for-feature comparison chart, an OS like Windows Mobile beat the iPhone in nearly every metric. When it came to actual usability, however, it was no contest. I don't need to tell you which ended up being more important in the long run.