Smartphone and 3G Stories

By: Steven Giles A Click author's name for more of his/her articles

The very first smartphone was known as Simon, which was created and styled by IBM in 1992 and presented as a concept product at COMDEX. COMDEX is the computer industry trade show held in Las Vegas, Nevada. This was shown and launched to the public in 1993 and sold by BellSouth. Aside from being a mobile phone, Simon also featured a world clock, note pad, email, calculator, calendar, send and receive fax and games.

There are no physical buttons that allow you to dial. The customers, instead, use a touch screen to choose phone numbers with a finger or make memos and facsimiles with an optional stylus. Text was written via a unique on-screen predictive keyboard. As of the present standards, Simon becomes a low-end product. The feature at the time, however, was very modern.

The Nokia Age

Nokia released its first set of smartphones, beginning with the Nokia Communicator line. The Nokia 9000 was the first of the bunch, launched in 1996. The unique palmtop computer type smartphone was borne out of a combined effort of an early successful and pricey PDA model created by Hewlett Packard, plus Nokia's bestselling phone at the same time. The early prototype models featured both devices organized using a hinge.

The Nokia 9210 was the first color screen Communicator type that was considered as a real smartphone, with an open operating system. The 9500 Communicator was the first camera phone Communicator and Nokia's very first WiFi phone. The 9300 Communicator is the 3-dimensional alternation into a smaller form factor.

The recent E90 Communicator involves GPS too. The Nokia Communicator model is outstanding and is the most expensive model sold by a main brand for almost the full lifespan of the series of models, immediately 20% and occasionally 40% pricier compared to the next most expensive smartphone featured by other major manufacturers.

More Devices

One of the devices described and sold as a smartphone was Ericsson R380. It, however, cannot run native third-party applications. Even though Nokia 9210 is one of the very first true smartphones having an operating system, Nokia still constantly refer to it as a Communicator. RIM launched and released the first BlackBerry in 2001. It was defined as the first smartphone enhanced for wireless email use, achieving over 8 million customers in just a few years. Three-fourth of the total belong to North America.

More Nokia Releases

The Nokia 7650 was announced in 2001, and was referred to as a smart phone in the media. The Nokia support site also refers to it as a smartphone. The press release, however, refers to it as an imaging phone. Handspring also presented the first widely famous smartphone tools and gadgets in the United States by joining a GSM phone module with Palm OS based Visor PDA.

Nokia launched the N-series of 3G smartphones in 2005. These were marketed as multimedia computers, instead of mobile phones.