IBM brought a touchscreen phone named Simon with more than phone functions to the market in 1994. Nokia produced the Nokia 9000, a clam-shell phone/PDA with a keyboard in 1996, which was, at the time, their best selling phone. But it wasn’t until the 1997 that Nokia called the GS 88 “Penelope,” the successor to the 9000 a “smartphone,” coining the term that would describe all phones with computing capabilities built in from then on. That’s the official story, and it’s factual, but I think it’s off the mark.
The Way of The Dinosaurs
The GS 88 was smart, certainly, and a phone, arguably, but its clamshell with a keyboard format showed its mini-computer heritage, coming out of “palmtop” computers like the HP100 LX and the Psion MXs, which were trying hard to be laptop computers you could fit in a pocket, though it had to be a big pocket. They were an attempt to get around the size and weight of early laptops in a time when the concept of something like an ultra-book was still in the realm of science fiction. While palmtop computers were a good idea, they never really caught on, and represent a branch of computer evolution that went the way of the dinosaurs. Like many techie folks, I’m fond of dinosaurs, and I was very fond of my palmtop computer, and sorry to see it die off. But it did, and we (mostly) moved on.
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