Yeah the touchscreen was the first that "worked" like you expected it to - before the best screens were the ones with styluses which could work well, but was a piece to lose/harder to use at a glance.
They also had the first browser that wasn’t severely crippled by compromises based on d-pad and extremely inaccurate touch input. Before iphone, the mobile web was a sad joke.
Opera Mobile (not Mini) for Symbian S60 with its d-pad bag of tricks was surprisingly usable with desktop websites, just crippled by a very low-res screen. Too bad it seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth even before Presto was abandoned.
I had some amazingly expensive Nokia 900 series phone that had WebKit on it for testing something for work (no way I was going to carry that monstrosity) and I remember it being impressive that it could actually faithfully render real pages. Still had garbage d-pad interaction.
I remember that - a huge advantage of the original Safari is it would show desktop versions of many websites; back then mobile sites were absolute trash. And it was usable because you could pinch + zoom.
