![IBM Simon (1994): the original smartphone, explained in its own ad [video]](https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/0084d708/img/favicon.ico)
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- Hacker News
- So sad to see what happened to ibm. Now they just milk government contracts.
- How much did this bad boy cost?by bobajeff
- They even predicted that smartphone users would inevitably ruin the (movie) theater experience (skip to 3:55 and 4:57)by rhplus
- I have one of these that was donated by a reader. I've never been able to get it to work because its battery (its infamous Achilles heel) would not charge.
If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears. I've never written about it in any depth.
- Back when I had VNC of my desktop on my Palm Tungsten T3, I thought I was living in the future. I'm not sure anymore that I was.by josh-wrale
- It's interesting how many false starts we had before the smartphone became ubiquitous. We had the Simon, Palm, then Nokia and Sony-Ericsson both with Symbian and different UI layers, WAP, various Windows CE devices, Blackberry pager descendants, and I probably missed a lot of them.by rbanffy
- You should watch the Apple Newton commercials too:
I love stuff like this. There's a great episode of the 90s PBS show Computer Chronicles with a ton of these:
https://computerchronicles.tv/#episode/1103
(Though at the time of this comment the Internet Archive seems to be down so if the video doesn't load, that's why.)
by LeoPanthera