Smartphones weren’t a new idea, Palm had been on it since the mid 90’s

Apple shipped the Newton in 1993. Well before Palm. And long, long, before shipping the Newton they were talking about hand held computers. The idea that they copied Palm is ridiculous.

Like Palm, the Newton wasn't good enough to achieve widespread market adoption (and Apple recognised that - killing it in 1998).

Sure - iPhone wasn't the first pocket computer and it was a very obvious invention that companies all over the world had failed to pull off for decades. I think Microsoft was the closest - their Pocket PC that was pretty good and they had a massive decade long version almost rebuilt from scratch about to ship when the iPhone came out... But Apple beat them to it and Google followed close behind - reportedly Google's early hardware partners were planning to ship Windows on those devices but Microsoft lost out on the contract negotiations, Satya Nadela said they were just too slow - their hardware partners want to wait for them.

Apple was first to ship a good pocket computer. That was real innovation. Real innovators are the ones that get it right, and being first (to get it right) matters because once it's done once everyone else can just copy your idea instead of wasting time developing and testing dead end solutions to hard problems. The early Android devices for example, looked more like the old Pocket PC or a Blackberry. They probably weren't good enough to be successful. They quickly copied ideas like the software keyboard from Apple, and quickly adopted Apple's open source technology like the WebKit rendering engine.