I suspect if Apple and NeXT never "merged", the phone market would be RIM vs (a very different) Android, but we'd be worse off.

Blackberries were OK at the time, but my god RIM was so culturally conservative and Google at the time had no design sense that we'd probably be 10 years behind where we are now - and if we even had software keyboards they'd be terrible.

Outside US, it would keep being all about J2ME, Symbian, Windows CE/Pocket PC, Bada OS.

Which keep being forgotten, in these kind of discussions.

RIP PalmOS you died before your time. Best mobile gaming OS I've used and ran for a week on some AA batteries

Nokia would still be around

They probably would still be the #1 phone manufacturer, still making terrible Symbian phones with terrible developer support. I was working for Nokia (and a shareholder) on their future phones c. 2004-2005 and it was horrible all the way down. Apple deserved to eat everyone's lunch.

Hard to argue with that. Still remember a co-intern telling me "Steve Jobs returned to Apple!" and just shrugging.

HTC G1 the original Android phone, was basically another sidekick. We’d have this shitty Android and WinMo for a decade longer and eventually things would get good.

The slate form factor was already being explored by other manufacturers before the iPhone came out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Microsoft had been doing it since 2000 but never made it cool. Here's one from 2004:

https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/03/review_hp_ipaq_6340/

I had one since 2000 as a daily driver and I loved the thing, but the app library was horrible.

The funny thing is, iPhone launched with no support for 3rd party apps. It took damned near a year for the first apps to arrive.

Sure, but unlike the iPhone, that thing was an unbelievable piece of shit.

It's not hard to extrapolate that something would have entered the market. I assume it would only have been a couple of years later.