The IBM Simon Personal Communicator on its charging base.
THOUGH smartphones are quite commonplace today, there were also a slew of smart devices that could make phone calls – from various Microsoft Windows-based mobiles to the Blackberry – in the early 2000s.
However, the first smartphone actually came out a lot earlier than that, and the company that made it was not based in Redmond, Washington, nor was its name fruit-based. Is it true that the first smartphone hit the market in the 1990s?
Verdict:
TRUE
The first smartphone ever launched to the mass market was actually the IBM Simon Personal Computer in 1994.
While at the time the term "smartphone" had yet to be coined (IBM called it a PDA, or personal digital assistant), people now consider it to be the first smartphone because of its features and capabilities.
Measuring 20cm x 6.4cm x 3.8cm, the IBM Simon was not a small device and would most likely be called a "water bottle" phone by kids today.
Not only that, this beast of device weighed in at just over half a kilo (over a pound) making it a hefty machine to lug around.
Unflattering measurements aside, the Simon did have a fairly large touchscreen which you could navigate with a stylus to do all manner of things.
It could of course make and receive calls, but thanks to it being designed as a PDA, you could also send email and faxes and even page someone.
You could also key events into your calendar, add contacts to your address books and make handwritten notes on your electronic notepad. It also had a calculator.
While you couldn't download apps as mobile Internet wasn't a thing yet – heck, BlueTooth wasn't even a thing yet in 1994 – it did have a PC Card slot with which you could increase the phone's whopping 1MB storage.
However, that PC Card slot was about the only way to get things into the Simon, and you would need to use it to update or install software.
The slot is also the home of the phone's pager card which more or less acts as the modem so that it can send and receive email and pages wirelessly. For those of you who don't know, a pager was a device that let you receive (and in the Simon's case, send) short text messages. SMS was not really a thing yet in 1994.
While it is true that by today's standards the Simon is a huge, heavy and underpowered device, it was a trailblazing invention back in 1994.
It paved the way for bigger and better things and without it, smartphones wouldn't exist today.
Unfortunately for IBM, the Simon was just too groundbreaking for its time and many could not see past the US$899 price tag – that's US$1,765 (RM7,810) today, adjusted for inflation – and it soon went out of production.
References:
1. https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/a/pdf/press%20release%201993.pdf
