I wasn't talking about anything except Windows CE phones (I had a Palm-based Treo phone at one point, but it was not really a very good phone or palm pilot.) WinCE phones were barely usable for their primary task, and were almost completely unusable for anything else because of the limitations inherent in WinCE and Microsoft's insistence on trying to replicate the Windows UI on something that was fundamentally unsuited for it.
Palm devices embraced the limitations of their platform; WinCE just struggled to run well on anything.
I will also dispute your "in large numbers" assertion, although I do not have access to detailed statistics. In 2008, Gartner asserted ~1.3 billion devices sold, with most growth in emerging markets. A couple of publicly available charts on Statista suggest that slightly less than 10% (~120m) of those were smartphones (Apple sold less than 1% of all phones that year at ~11m units, a ~9x growth over its just-over 1m units in 2007).
The only "smartphone" models sold meaningfully in largish numbers before the iPhone would have been BlackBerry. Everything else was an also-ran. And even BlackBerry was an also-ran compared to people just buying phones.
Palm devices embraced the limitations of their platform; WinCE just struggled to run well on anything.
I will also dispute your "in large numbers" assertion, although I do not have access to detailed statistics. In 2008, Gartner asserted ~1.3 billion devices sold, with most growth in emerging markets. A couple of publicly available charts on Statista suggest that slightly less than 10% (~120m) of those were smartphones (Apple sold less than 1% of all phones that year at ~11m units, a ~9x growth over its just-over 1m units in 2007).
The only "smartphone" models sold meaningfully in largish numbers before the iPhone would have been BlackBerry. Everything else was an also-ran. And even BlackBerry was an also-ran compared to people just buying phones.