What was the first smartphone? Your first smartphone might have been a Blackberry. They were all the rage in the mid-2000s and everyone from schoolteachers to CEOs just had to have one. It might have been an early Android or iPhone. Both launched about 15 years ago. Or, it could have been… something else. Microsoft had a torturous dalliance with smartphones back then, too, and I think we can all agree it’s something we’d rather forget.
But what, exactly, is a smartphone?
Of course it all depends on how you define “smart.” If it’s 1996, it means some very basic internet (what else was there?) plus room for 200 contacts, a clock, a calendar and a fax program. (Yeah, that’s right! FAX!) That’s what you got with this Nokia 9000-series communicator. Looking at it folded up, you wouldn’t even guess it was a phone, but it opened to become something like a tiny computer.
Even for its day it was a behemoth, about the same size and weight as a 20 ounce beer can. But it was the dawn of a new age and without it, the world of today’s smartphones might not even exist. It had a very unique fold-open keyboard of the sort you might remember from dumbphones of the last few years. Take a closer look:
Opening the phone up made the hinged antenna look a little less dorky, too.
I’ll admit, I wanted one of these
What a dream device this was for the young mobile professional back in the days of the Macarena. At that time, just having a cell phone at all made you one of the elite, but imagine having one device that could actually store your calendar entries, your phone book, let you send a letter (via FAX!) and even check out a web page (presumably at a very very slow speed.) This little device did almost everything a secretary could do, and that was a valuable and exotic idea back in the 1990s.
Nokia didn’t sell a lot of these, considering they cost about $800 a pop and cell minutes were still expensive back then. But it was a good proof-of-concept and Nokia continued to develop the line until they were close to the size of an iPhone. Sadly though they were eclipsed by later generations of phones from Palm, Apple, and eventually Google, but it all started here.
What about the other early smartphones?
When I bring up my long-distant admiration for the Nokia 9000, inevitably someone wants to challenge me about it being the first smartphone. They tend to bring up this device:
This is the Palm VII. It was one of a line of what were called “personal digital assistants” back then. It would keep all your personal information organized and let you recall what you needed. For the 1990s it was a very capable little device. The Palm VII was the top of the heap, because it let you get data off the internet… extremely slowly. You couldn’t really browse web pages, but you could get some basic services.
First of all, I tell people, the Palm VII didn’t hit the streets until 1999, several years after the Nokia 9000. Second, it wasn’t a phone. You couldn’t make calls with it. Palm did eventually make a phone, but this wasn’t it.
There was one device that did, technically, beat the Nokia to the punch. It was this rather comical-looking IBM Simon, which was technically available in 1994.
Sporting a non-backlit LCD screen that was just as dim as it looks in the picture, as well as battery life of approximately 1 hour with heavy usage, it did technically qualify as the world’s first smartphone. But, it was only available through one carrier on the planet and if you happened to be outside of the southeastern US, it didn’t work at all. I’ll give it props for being the first, grudgingly, but I’ll also say it wasn’t as usable or even as available as the Nokia.
Before you laugh at the past…
Here’s something to think about when you look at the chunky Nokia 9000 or their 1990s kin… most of them still lasted longer on a battery than any phone today and almost all of them were smaller than a Galaxy Note. Have we really gone in the right direction?
