_:nd0635a2de31448768773b5dea75790dbxb0
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"\n\tMost of us can trace back the recent history of smartphones through a plethora of Androids, iPhones, and Blackberrys. Maybe you recall a nascent phone-PDA hybrid from Palm or Kyocera. But I bet you don&#39;t remember the IBM Simon, the world&#39;s first smartphone, which hit the streets 20 years ago today. \n\n\n\tSimon was so advanced, people didn&#39;t know quite what to call it—when it hit the streets on August 16, 1994, the term &quot;smartphone&quot; was still three years away from entering our vocabulary. IBM called it a &quot;personal communicator phone,&quot; meant to compete with PDAs from companies like Apple, Casio, and Tandy. \n\n\n\tBut Simon offered something those early PDAs didn&#39;t: The ability to make and receive cellular phone calls. It was the device&#39;s defining feature, so much so that IBM touted it as primarily a phone, just one with built-in PDA capabilities. From IBM&#39;s November 1993 press release: \n\n\n\t\tAccording to BellSouth Cellular Corp.&#39;s product development manager Rich Guidotti, Simon represents the first real personal communicator because it was designed to be a cellular phone—a communications device—first, and a computer second.\n\t\n\n\n\tThe features on this great-great-grandphone were pretty limited by 2014 standards:  Simon could make calls, receive pager messages, and send and receive emails. It had a calculator, a calendar, and an address book. And it could send and receive faxes, using either the on-screen keyboard or a stylus to transmit hand-written notes or sketches. \n\n\n\tYes, a touchscreen. Simon&#39;s 1.5 by 4.5-inch, side-illuminated, radioactive-puke-green LCD reacted to either stylus or finger touch. Reviews griped that the tall, narrow screen made it hard to read or reply to faxes. The option to hand-write responses helped somewhat, and the keyboard even had an early form of predictive typing, showing a small portion of the keyboard and offering only the most logical next letters based on what you&#39;d already typed.\n\nSimon&#39;s various screens. Photos from Bill Buxton&#39;s collection at Microsoft Research.\n\n\n\tUnfortunately, the limitations of 1994 technology meant that Simon—the size of a portable Bluetooth speaker, weighing in at just over a pound, with a battery that could only support 60 minutes of call time—never really caught on in the market. When it first hit, Simon was priced at $900 with a two-year BellSouth contract. Subsequent price cuts eventually brought the price down to $600, but it wasn&#39;t enough. BellSouth only sold 50,000 of the devices, most of which were later recalled by IBM and destroyed.\n\n\n\tStill, it&#39;s fascinating to see how far we&#39;ve come since Simon&#39;s brief tenure. Nobody&#39;s trying to send faxes from their smartphones today, but every device that fits the term today has email, calculator, and calendar functions, and they&#39;re all controlled by touchscreen. \n\n\n\tAnd Simon was the first device to grapple with a problem smartphone makers are still trying to solve today: The perfect screen size. Home Office Computing&#39;s 1995 review of the IBM Simon echoes a complaint we still here today.\n\n\n\t\tIt may be that we&#39;re still asking too much of PDAs. For example, how can you possibly fit an acceptably large touch screen on an object that&#39;s supposed to fit in your pocket?\n\t\n\n\n\tIn 2014, we still haven&#39;t quite figured that out.\n\n\n\tPerhaps most interesting of all is the way our emphasis on smartphone capabilities has changed. In 1994, IBM touted Simon as a phone first, with additional features added to the bedrock capability of making and receiving calls on the go. Today, we use our smartphones for email, texts, and about a million different forms of social media—and maybe, if we absolutely have to, we make a few phone calls. \n\n\n\tHappy 20th birthday, Simon. You&#39;re the one that started it all. \n\n"
<https://gizmodo.com/simon-the-original-smartphone-turns-20-today-1622369289>