No, it also supportedl standard html. And not just in theory, I routinely visited such pages with the phone. Limiting factor was rather the screen size here, sometimes leading to strangely rendered pages. But there already existed smartphones with bigger screens, eg. the Nokia communicators, which didn't have that specific issue.

Yes, the IPhone revolutionized the market, especially because it turned the old distribution models upside-down (which the established manufacturers were in no position to do).

But purely from a technical standpoint it was nothing completely special. Some things were better, some things worse than for other phones.

The symbian phones were typically much better from the classical technical standpoint.
Windows CE devices had superior versatility.
Blackberry was optimized for business integration.
But all high-end devices were "smartphones" at that stage.