How memory fades. People used smartphones for years, in large numbers, prior to the iPhone. Nokia, Blackberry were the market leaders. Also Palm and MS and probably others I've forgotten. Sony...
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.
WinCE phones? No, they mostly weren't. When they weren't crashing, they were only really accessible with a stylus and often not well built. Microsoft didn't get mobile UI and stability correct until Windows Mobile, and by then it was too late for Microsoft to be a major factor.
I assumed by "CE phone" GP meant WM5 - how many non-WM && WWAN equipped devices were there? WM5 way okay for its days, and with the buttons and controls that don't change they were quite useful.
It should come as no surprise that there were many, which is one of the reasons where Windows Mobile failed. All the other manufacturers had been burned badly by Microsoft's inability to deliver anything reliable on mobile (and eventually saw themselves directly in competition because of the Nokia purchase) and Android starting being a cheaper, more focused option.
Fundamentally, Windows CE was flawed beyond repair, and it should have been obvious from the very first iPaq and sibling devices. I used my Palm devices every day. I rarely turned on my iPaq (available third party software was also a problem; there was lots for Palm and comparatively nothing for WinCE).
These, at least, had legit keyboards.