What was the first smartphone in history?
If you’re a close reader, you’ll find a small discrepancy in this blog post: We previously referred to the iPhone, launched in 2007, as the first smartphone in history. Indeed, if you ask the average person on the street, that’s probably what they’ll tell you. But that’s not entirely true. The iPhone was no doubt the first smartphone to provide a color-screen and a graphic interface manifulated by finger gestures, and the first to be really ready for market demand. It was sold in astronomical numbers that entirely changed the industry, and our lives, as we knew them. But it wasn’t actually the first smartphone.
IBM’s Simon, was the original claim to fame. It was designed 30 years ago by Japanese manufacturing company Mitsubishi. Sticking to the popular design theme of the time, it was a “Brick Phone”. But it had a black and white touch screen that could be operated with a Stylus Pen. It could send and receive faxes and emails, it contained an address book, you could keep hand-written reminders and it had a calculator. A technological wonder for its time, well before palm-pilots became the new hot thing about six years later. But the market was clearly not ready for such a device: only 50,000 pieces were sold, and only a year went by before dear old Simon had to get off the stage and be forgotten forever. Then, we waited 13 years until Steve Jobs came up with the concept anew.