Comment by rektide

Pocket PC/Windows CE/Windows Mobile all seem far more like examples of phones trying really hard to be general-purpose like, rather than examples of phones being different. And getting fairly close.

Personally I think it's hard to justify phones as something different than general purpose computers. A device that can load fairly arbitrary apps is already almost by definition a general purpose computers, it's just a matter of what has been built and/or what is allowed to be shipped, and what system resources are available (few, in many of your examples, often owing to it being the aughts). Now that the system resources are clearly no longer a differentiator, it's almost all just corporate-politics & the war-against-general-purpose-computing vested-interests enforcing the distinction.