<P> Outside the U.S. and Japan, Nokia was seeing success with its smartphones based on Symbian, originally developed by Psion for their personal organisers, and it was the most popular smartphone OS in Europe during the middle to late 2000s . Initially, Nokia's Symbian smartphones were focused on business with the Eseries, similar to Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices at the time . From 2006 onwards, Nokia started producing consumer - focused smartphones, popularized by the entertainment - focused Nseries . In Asia, with the exception of Japan, the trend was similar to that of Europe . Until 2010 Symbian was the world's most widely used smartphone operating system . </P> <P> Before 2007, it was common for smartphones to have a physical numeric keypad or QWERTY keyboard in either a candybar or sliding form factor . </P> <P> In early 2007, Apple Inc. introduced the iPhone, the first smartphone to use a capacitive multi-touch interface . (A year prior the LG Prada was the first mobile phone released with a large capacitive touchscreen, but it was not a smartphone, and its screen was not multi-touch .) The iPhone was notable for abandoning the use of a stylus, keyboard, or keypad typical for smartphones at the time, in favor of a large touchscreen for direct finger input as its main means of interaction . Though one columnist described the initial iPhone as "not a smartphone by conventional terms, being that a smartphone is a platform device that allows software to be installed," the opening of Apple's App Store a year later not only satisfied this requirement, but it became the new main paradigm for smartphone software distribution and installation . </P> <P> In October 2008, the first phone to use Google's Android operating system called the HTC Dream (also known as the T - Mobile G1) was released . It also had a large touchscreen, but still retained a slide - out physical keyboard . Later versions of Android added and then improved on - screen keyboard support, and physical keyboards on Android devices quickly became rare . Although Android's adoption was relatively slow at first, it started to gain widespread popularity in 2010, and in early 2012 dominated the smartphone market share worldwide, which continues to this day . </P>

When did the first touch screen smartphone come out