Apple is never first to do something.
I started coding for J2ME on a Vodafone contest, based on Sharp GX20, which was using DOCOMO APIs in 2003.
Afterwards I joined Nokia, so I kind of had an idea how we, and our competition was doing in the market.
US was the only market that stayed PDA centric, with exception of Blackberry adoption, until the iPhone came to be.
Traditionally it was the only market where Nokia had issues.
Apple is never first to do something.