Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was state of the art around the time the iPhone hit: HTC8525 [0]. That is not a phone, that is a ridiculously small screen welded to a slow computer with terrible battery life; and it was $299 on contract at the time. The disruption in the iPhone was technical, social, political and economic. [0] http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/at-t-8525/4505-6452_7-32...
Nah, the old Windows phones were just fine. Did many of the things we now pretend that Apple invented. But they were for nerds. And huge phones sell reasonably well today. The functionality was really already there. The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use. And in the end, it's a phone, not a cultural revolution.
The old windows mobile was a complete dog. Let's take just one example, individual processes could only be allocated up to 32 megabytes of RAM. Really. That's one reason why it could never have run a decent browser, or really a decent anything else. That alone rendered it fundamentally crippled compared to iOS full 32 bit preemptive multitasking kernel. Yes iOS is fully multitasking, only user apps are restricted in their multitasking privileges by the sand boxing system, but background services have none if those limitations.
It was limitations like this that meant projects like Courier would never have been able to compete with iOS. It's why Microsoft had no choice but to develop an entirely new OS core for their mobile platform, losing crucial years of competitiveness.
Google was lucky. Although Android was never originally intended to use multitouch gestures or an accelerated UI layer, at least it was based on a Linux core so had the fundamental technical underpinnings to support competitive application level services. This gave Android a few years head start on Microsoft, even though they were a few years behind Apple, just enough for them to occupy the low end of the market and eventually mount a credible challenge in the mid and high end.