IBM Simon (1994): the original smartphone, explained in its own ad [video]

2 comments

• rbanffy4 minutes ago
  It's interesting how many false starts we had before the smartphone became ubiquitous. We had the Simon, Palm, then Nokia and Sony-Ericsson both with Symbian and different UI layers, WAP, various Windows CE devices, Blackberry pager descendants, and I probably missed a lot of them.
  • pavlov0 minutes ago
    Japan&#x27;s i-mode was a HTML-based smart mobile service that was very popular from 1999 to 2008:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;I-mode" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;I-mode</a><p>At 80M subscribers, it was probably the most popular way in the world to access mobile internet pre-iPhone.
• LeoPanthera20 minutes ago
  You should watch the Apple Newton commercials too:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;lkg4EAK0Y30" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;lkg4EAK0Y30</a><p>I love stuff like this. There&#x27;s a great episode of the 90s PBS show Computer Chronicles with a ton of these:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;computerchronicles.tv&#x2F;#episode&#x2F;1103" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;computerchronicles.tv&#x2F;#episode&#x2F;1103</a><p>(Though at the time of this comment the Internet Archive seems to be down so if the video doesn&#x27;t load, that&#x27;s why.)