Could we have made this technological advance sooner?

We're living creatures with brains their are hundreds of thousands of people that help and create tech advances we all make mistakes we could always be more efficient with our time. Could we have quit possiably created SmartPhones sooner?
The biggest break was june 2007 with the iPhone and its unique interface and tech. After as all companies do is compete. Today we have a wide range of cell phones similar to the iPhone and were accustomed to it. With that being said. Is it not very possible that we could have created the iPhone/smartphone 10 years sooner 1997. If you take a step back from 2017 to 2010 we had for instance iPhone 4s/5 it had a retina display still quit a impressive gadget that's only 13 years from 1997 so could we have done better was it theoretically possible for our mind to handle at the time (in your opinon ofcourse)?
*LASTLY - beyond the possibility of the smartphone being created 1997 vs 2007 had it been created in 1997 would it have to been done by steve jobs from Apple?

its always interesting to know what could have been done sooner.

To some extent we had smartphones before iPhone. Touch screen windows phones, while weaker than iPhone, already existed. And before that, already in early 2000s army was using touch screen technology and hand held devices with a lot of potential like early smartphones. You see, army gets all these things first, several years before civilian public does. Then only one country has that technology, army uses it and then several countries start using same type of technology, that's then its released for civilian use.

The iPhone was not the first device of it's type, and none of the tech in it was completely new. Year before the iPhone I was using a Nokia Communicator. What Apple did was bring a whole load of things together at the right time and at a bearable price. All they did in reality was merge the PDA with a mobile phone.

Could it have been done earlier? Yes, and it was, but not in an acceptable form factor or at an acceptable price.

Don't get caught up in things like the retina display, that's just marketing - it's doesn't sound so good if you just say a screen with really small pixels, which is what it is. Just like at the moment people are getting wowed by the latest OLED screens despite their MAJOR flaws.

If you want to figure out what's really happening you need to view the tech with a cynics eye!