iPhone (2G)

Apple proudly claimed upon the release of its first ever mobile that it had reinvented the phone – and it was right. Combining three major assets – telephony, an iPod, and internet communications via Wi-Fi and EDGE – the product was the most exciting thing to happen to the market in years, and set the bar high for competitors who had never gone up against it before.

From the then-advanced sensors that allowed the phone to rotate images and webpages to landscape – now a mobile phone staple – to the integration of Google Maps and a class-leading camera, the iPhone was unsurprisingly named Time Magazine's Invention of the Year.

"It is but the ghost of iPhones yet to come," said Time's Lev Grossman, forecasting that the first generation of iPhone would look "primitive" in a few years – and he was right.