Add visual voicemail to the mix -- another solved problem. The point is, Apple didn't develop a completely new device that nobody had ever seen before. It's all incremental improvements.
Apple was very careful entering the new phone market -- they heavily leveraged their existing iPod market and technology.
However, if you go back far enough Apple was one of the pioneers of touch screen portable computers with the Newton. Apple invented the term PDA. In terms of invention, that was something very different. They got a long of things wrong with that device that was corrected by competitors doing it much simpler.
I'm not saying that Apple doesn't take risks -- your other post was filled with good examples. It's just that their most successful products tend to be low-risk slow-burn affairs.
