GeneralIBM Simon was the big daddy of all smartphones, is 20 years old now

IBM Simon was the big daddy of all smartphones, is 20 years old now

The Earth didn’t shake on August 16 in 1994 although it should have considering that the IBM Simon personal communicator was launched into the world on the said date. Our current obsession with upgrading to the latest and greatest mobile hardware can’t be blamed fully on the daddy of all smartphones, but rest assured that such gadgets are adding to electronic waste at increasingly scary rates.

Rewind to 1994, and imagine waking up to the news that a personal digital assistant which can make and receive calls has been born. The word ‘smartphone’ didn’t exist back then and IBM chose not to call its latest invention a PDA (personal digital assistant) simply because it wasn’t one. Simon was built by IBM and distributed via carrier BellSouth Cellular Corporation, and it was marketed as more of a communications device which could also serve as a PDA.

IBM Simon

Apart from dialing up numbers or picking up calls, users could look forward to treating it as a pager, a tool for emailing, an address book, a calendar, an appointment scheduler and a pen-based sketchpad among other things. The IBM Simon was sold to BellSouth Cellular customers at a princely sum of $899 on contract. The price was later slashed to $599 because it was the 90’s and $899 was not easy to come by for most people.

The Simon phone had a touchscreen LCD displaying a normal PC keypad as well as a telephone keyboard layout. You could type in words using the bundled stylus or simply trace out your message on the touch panel with a finger. Handwriting recognition wasn’t well developed back then and IBM promised there would be no problem with the software interpreting freehand letters since only an image of the same would be sent to the receiver of the fax or mail.

First Smartphone

Users were even offered the option of taking advantage of a predictive keyboard of sorts on the IBM Simon. This mode was also aimed at people who preferred larger characters on their keypads. Posted above are photos of the phone and its screen published in the Bill Buxton collection on the Microsoft Research website. The device weighed a clunky 18 ounces to make it heavier than the current generation iPad Air and measured about 8 x 2.5 x 1.5 inches.

From the IBM Simon to the iPhone, smartphones have changed our lives in more ways than one. Now if only we could stop wasting time on WhatsApp and do something more productive with our mobiles.

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