Someone else would have made a phone with the same multitouch idea eventually.
But it would have been one phone among 50 they sold, the gestures would have been clunky, it would still have had a physical keyboard lurking somewhere, their salespeople wouldn’t have known how to sell it, and everyone else would look at the market crater and decided the idea would never sell.
The LG Prada had a touch screen. But did it have A full HTML browser? A music/video store ecosystem? Would LG have been able to create an operating system on par with iOS? Within a year would they have had a development environment and a platform to create what became the App Store? Would they have been able to dictate to the carriers that they were going to upgrade their own OS and not be beholden to them?
The original statement that I was replying to was:
The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level.
The LG Prada being a touch screen and therefore would have evolved into the iPhone is as unrealistic as thinking whatever the knock off touch screen phone that Sprint released in late 2007 was going to evolve into an iPhone.
Microsoft was stuck on making Windows Mobile a small PC.
RIM was poo pooing the touchscreen two years after the iPhone came out.
Google was aping the Blackberry with the Android and completely started over after the iPhone came out.
Nokia didn't have the OS or the platform to make a full fledge smart phone. But they were the most likely.