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.
Psion is the big one - the Organiser, Series 3 and Series 5 in particular. The latter was the genesis of Symbian, which Motorola was also a partner in.
On a date, I once showed a woman I wanted to impress my Palm Pilot. Not only was she utterly unimpressed, she went on to marry an A-list Hollywood celebrity.
It was really the touch screen UI, which was brought to market by Apple. Always been curious if it was developed there or if like the desktop windowed UI it was pioneered elsewhere.
Prior efforts were menu oriented or attempts at desktop UI on a tiny screen, like WinCE.
The basics of PalmOS were fairly touch oriented but resistive rather than capacitive, which made a difference usability wise. Menus though could get desktop-y.
I think the big diff was assumption of handwriting as the UI. Latter palm treo had a keyboard like blackberry, I used several generations of those before trying the HTC g1 :).
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.
The ad doesn't show me how the device works, there's just a person talking and making promises. I guess the device's resolution and contrast are so low and it looks a bit underwhelming in general that they didn't go with that first...
The display was really impressive for the era, resistive touch, backlit etc.; this is two years before the Palm Pilot launched.
Most people would not have thought "underwhelming", and displays no better than that were commonplace in really popular devices for the next five years, including in the Palm V and Vx.
The problem these early smartphones had with their audience was lack of precedent. The Newton launched the year before but almost nobody would have seen them in the wild. Maybe geeky people had seen the Tandy/Casio Zoomer in print ads or Radio Shack.
Devices of this kind that launched after people started seeing Palm Pilots everywhere had an easier time.
That, I think, is why it is sold the way it is in this ad; few people would have had any reason to know how they worked or what they could offer, so "features-first" advertising would not really have reached a wide enough market. This kind of advertising was really commonplace for computers.
They even predicted that smartphone users would inevitably ruin the (movie) theater experience (skip to 3:55 and 4:57)
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.
Japan's i-mode was a HTML-based smart mobile service that was very popular from 1999 to 2008:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
At 80M subscribers, it was probably the most popular way in the world to access mobile internet pre-iPhone.
I-mode also introduced the original set of emojis that are now supported everywhere.
> I probably missed a lot of them
Psion is the big one - the Organiser, Series 3 and Series 5 in particular. The latter was the genesis of Symbian, which Motorola was also a partner in.
Psions were PDAs, not really in the smartphone arena until their OS (EPOC?) became Symbian and started appearing on Nokia phones.
Same for Palm - it wasn’t until the Treo series that they started trying to make inroads in the smartphone field.
I had both Palm PDAs (a V and a tungsten 3) and a psion (diamond Mako), fun times with portable computers.
On a date, I once showed a woman I wanted to impress my Palm Pilot. Not only was she utterly unimpressed, she went on to marry an A-list Hollywood celebrity.
It was really the touch screen UI, which was brought to market by Apple. Always been curious if it was developed there or if like the desktop windowed UI it was pioneered elsewhere.
Prior efforts were menu oriented or attempts at desktop UI on a tiny screen, like WinCE.
The basics of PalmOS were fairly touch oriented but resistive rather than capacitive, which made a difference usability wise. Menus though could get desktop-y.
I think the big diff was assumption of handwriting as the UI. Latter palm treo had a keyboard like blackberry, I used several generations of those before trying the HTC g1 :).
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.
The ad doesn't show me how the device works, there's just a person talking and making promises. I guess the device's resolution and contrast are so low and it looks a bit underwhelming in general that they didn't go with that first...
The display was really impressive for the era, resistive touch, backlit etc.; this is two years before the Palm Pilot launched.
Most people would not have thought "underwhelming", and displays no better than that were commonplace in really popular devices for the next five years, including in the Palm V and Vx.
The problem these early smartphones had with their audience was lack of precedent. The Newton launched the year before but almost nobody would have seen them in the wild. Maybe geeky people had seen the Tandy/Casio Zoomer in print ads or Radio Shack.
Devices of this kind that launched after people started seeing Palm Pilots everywhere had an easier time.
That, I think, is why it is sold the way it is in this ad; few people would have had any reason to know how they worked or what they could offer, so "features-first" advertising would not really have reached a wide enough market. This kind of advertising was really commonplace for computers.
About 2 minutes in they start showing the device being used and it's interface.
You should watch the Apple Newton commercials too:
https://youtu.be/lkg4EAK0Y30
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.)
How much did this bad boy cost?
that predictive key feature is hilarious. At 4.20 in the video.
How on earth can that be faster than typing on a regular qwerty keyboard.