Today, Microsoft announced Windows Mobile 7. This looks to be their all-cards-on-the-table effort to merge the Zune and Windows Mobile and enable a credible iPhone contender. Looking at the feature chart and evolution of just the last few years of Windows Mobile brought up to me the influence that Apple's iPhone has had on the Windows Mobile platform which had years of head-start.

Reflecting upon the past 3 years with the iPhone, I thought about all the things that today seem like no-brainer features that are required of a smartphone in order move any decent number of units. I've compiled a short list of features that while Apple might not have invented, they certainly popularized with the iPhone causing the competition to adopt in order to stay competitive.

The whole paradigm of the mobile phone has even changed and shifted to "smartphones only please" atmosphere in large part to the iPhone. 'Feature phones' are still dominant but with the current momentum that the mobile market is seeing, 'feature phone' days are numbered. So with that thought in mind, what has the iPhone popularized in the 3 years on market?

1. Capacitive glass touchscreen - no more plastic-y touch film over the screen ruining display clarity and that yielding surface that flexes to your touch.

2. Multi-touch - The ability to track more than 1 touch at a time allows all sorts of more interesting interactions, like pinching and multiple virtual button presses. This opens the door to a pair of other killer features...

3. No stylus - Both of the above contribute to this "feature" but the iPhone was definitely the first phone to challenge the mobile touch screen status-quo of using tiny stylus' to accurately pin-point your press. Lately, any phone with a stylus just looks passé.

4. App Store - Love it or hate the approval process and locked-down kingdom, it does have a huge effect on the end-experience of the iPhone. The model of providing third-party apps has since been adopted by players like Google and Blackberry.

5. Virtual keyboard - Not the keyboard explicitly. I'm referring to the notion that a physical keyboard was required for fast input into a mobile device. With the capacitive glass touchscreen and large screen real estate, the iPhone effectively popularized the idea that a soft-keyboard is "good enough" to actually type quickly on.

6. Visual voicemail - The feature that was heralded as possible because of the intimate relationship between carrier and hardware manufacturer and the "first of other features" that were to be spawned off the partnership. In reality, this was the only real feature to come out of it but what a doosey. It seems like such an obvious feature now and other manufactures have rushed to implement the feature following AT&T and Apple's lead.

7. Usable Web browser - Arguably the iPhone's biggest gift to the community. Prior to the iPhone, WAP comprised most people's mobile web experience, which is to say that it wasn't the real web. More like a second-class citizen's web. Apple's use of MobileSafari in the iPhone leaned on a number of the aforementioned features to create a usable, more captivating and friendly mobile interface to the real web. Yes, mobile IE did provide this years prior on the Windows Mobile platform, but friendly it was not. The essential differentiation on experience being presentation: scroll bars vs. drag panning, easy pinch and double-tap zoom, ability to faithfully render the latest web technology (Flash not withstanding of course). If a smartphone today doesn't accurately render most web pages, it isn't considered up to snuff.

All these things together, despite the iPhone's flaws, have pushed the iPhone to accomplish its stated goal of being "revolutionary". You don't have to love it all, you don't even have to drink the Kool-aid or be sucked into the reality distortion field to see the iPhone's massive effect on today's mobile phone market.