4 ms·

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 an

by rbanffy 2mo ago

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.

pavlov 2mo ago
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 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.
api 2mo ago
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.
- NikolaNovak 2mo ago
  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 :).
- vidarh 2mo ago
  There was a whole generation of touch focused devices around '99-'03 or so, mostly hampered by too slow hardware, too low resolutions, cost, awful battery life and awful capacitative touch. I worked on a Linux based tablet back in '99, that had all of those flaws. Apples biggest innovation was recognising when the hardware had caught up enough to make this attractive to normal consumers. That's not a small thing - the entire rest of the industry tried,failed, and wrongly assumed the failure meant the concept was a dead end and mostly abandoned it, before Apple resurrected it.
  - rbanffy 2mo ago
    > and awful capacitative touch. I think until the iPhone most of the touchscreens were resistive and single-touch. It was multi-touch capacitive screens, alongside Jeff Han's multi-touch demo that captivated everybody's imagination.
    - vidarh 2mo ago
      You're absolutely right - I mixed them up. (Incidentally, this is the tablet I worked on: https://digitaltmuseum.no/0210211515576/nettbrett https://digitaltmuseum.no/0210211515576/nettbrett - nothing to make you feel old like having tech you've worked on catalogued by a museum; the early versions ran NanoX with a custom Opera port)
timthorn 2mo ago
> 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.
- loloquwowndueo 2mo ago
  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.
  - rbanffy 2mo ago
    > it wasn’t until the Treo series This was because the acquisition of Handspring, right?
    - loloquwowndueo 2mo ago
      Ahh correct, I forgot about that. And do I remember correctly that Handspring was founded by ex-Palm employees to produce PDAs with licensed PalmOS and a cellular modem/phone built in?
  - cameldrv 2mo ago
    There was also the Qualcomm pdQ and the Kyocera 6035 I think that combined a Palm and a phone/cellular modem. It’s surprising to me that it took as long as it did for smartphones to really get popular. Some of it was just that the typing UI was pretty bad until the blackberry had the mini keyboard and then Apple came out with a usable touch screen/software combo that was good enough. Also for a long time web browsers on phones/PDAs existed and worked, but the UI was lousy so they were very cumbersome to use. Apple had a few big innovations in UI that helped, multitouch, and double tap to zoom to a column, but the 2006 era windows mobile phones also had fairly decent browsers. Microsoft really blew it on phones.
- 2mo ago
subpixel 2mo ago
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.
- Bluestein 2mo ago
  Don't mind. He probably had a Vx :)
- JKCalhoun 2mo ago
  Yeah, that will do it.
- kstrauser 2mo ago
  One day I was getting a haircut in my smallish Midwest hometown. Another customer was grousing about being unable to contact a friend, and just happened to mention someone I knew. I pulled out my Palm and said I had their phone number. The guy also pulled out the Palm that he was carrying, and I used the IR sender thing to share our mutual friend’s contact info. My barber was like “what in the Star Trek just happened”? I didn’t know the other guy. We had a mutual friend. We both had Palms. It was a whole list of unlikely coincidences that had to line up well. It surely did feel sci-fi. That was the one and only time I ever used that feature.
YZF 2mo ago
Newton (still have mine) ... Not a phone but a smart full screen computer.
lproven 2mo ago
> how many false starts we had I did a double-take at that. False starts? The Palm? Blackberry? These things sold in the tens of millions and I saw them everywhere. I'm a Brit: I used a Psion. My PDA didn't sync with my desktop; I didn't do that stuff on the desktop, I did it in a better, far more reliable computer in my pocket. As Palms caught on, I blew the owners' minds by IRDA zapping them contact details. The point being that there was a time everyone with an office corporate job carried them. To a lesser extent, Nokia, WinCE, Sony-Ericsson etc. Those gadgets sold in vast numbers, too. I mean, yes, compared to the modern smartphone industry, which is 10-100x the size of the entire PC industry including servers... But "false starts"? $ multi-billion companies with household-name products? I would be extraordinarily happy with a "false start" such as that! It strikes me as like saying bicycles were a false start because more people do more miles in cars.

by rbanffy 2mo ago

pavlov 2mo ago

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 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.

api 2mo ago

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.

NikolaNovak 2mo ago
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 :).
vidarh 2mo ago
There was a whole generation of touch focused devices around '99-'03 or so, mostly hampered by too slow hardware, too low resolutions, cost, awful battery life and awful capacitative touch. I worked on a Linux based tablet back in '99, that had all of those flaws. Apples biggest innovation was recognising when the hardware had caught up enough to make this attractive to normal consumers. That's not a small thing - the entire rest of the industry tried,failed, and wrongly assumed the failure meant the concept was a dead end and mostly abandoned it, before Apple resurrected it.
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  > and awful capacitative touch. I think until the iPhone most of the touchscreens were resistive and single-touch. It was multi-touch capacitive screens, alongside Jeff Han's multi-touch demo that captivated everybody's imagination.
  - vidarh 2mo ago
    You're absolutely right - I mixed them up. (Incidentally, this is the tablet I worked on: https://digitaltmuseum.no/0210211515576/nettbrett https://digitaltmuseum.no/0210211515576/nettbrett - nothing to make you feel old like having tech you've worked on catalogued by a museum; the early versions ran NanoX with a custom Opera port)

timthorn 2mo ago

> 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.

loloquwowndueo 2mo ago
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.
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  > it wasn’t until the Treo series This was because the acquisition of Handspring, right?
  - loloquwowndueo 2mo ago
    Ahh correct, I forgot about that. And do I remember correctly that Handspring was founded by ex-Palm employees to produce PDAs with licensed PalmOS and a cellular modem/phone built in?
- cameldrv 2mo ago
  There was also the Qualcomm pdQ and the Kyocera 6035 I think that combined a Palm and a phone/cellular modem. It’s surprising to me that it took as long as it did for smartphones to really get popular. Some of it was just that the typing UI was pretty bad until the blackberry had the mini keyboard and then Apple came out with a usable touch screen/software combo that was good enough. Also for a long time web browsers on phones/PDAs existed and worked, but the UI was lousy so they were very cumbersome to use. Apple had a few big innovations in UI that helped, multitouch, and double tap to zoom to a column, but the 2006 era windows mobile phones also had fairly decent browsers. Microsoft really blew it on phones.
2mo ago

subpixel 2mo ago

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.

Bluestein 2mo ago
Don't mind. He probably had a Vx :)
JKCalhoun 2mo ago
Yeah, that will do it.
kstrauser 2mo ago
One day I was getting a haircut in my smallish Midwest hometown. Another customer was grousing about being unable to contact a friend, and just happened to mention someone I knew. I pulled out my Palm and said I had their phone number. The guy also pulled out the Palm that he was carrying, and I used the IR sender thing to share our mutual friend’s contact info. My barber was like “what in the Star Trek just happened”? I didn’t know the other guy. We had a mutual friend. We both had Palms. It was a whole list of unlikely coincidences that had to line up well. It surely did feel sci-fi. That was the one and only time I ever used that feature.

YZF 2mo ago

Newton (still have mine) ... Not a phone but a smart full screen computer.

lproven 2mo ago

> how many false starts we had I did a double-take at that. False starts? The Palm? Blackberry? These things sold in the tens of millions and I saw them everywhere. I'm a Brit: I used a Psion. My PDA didn't sync with my desktop; I didn't do that stuff on the desktop, I did it in a better, far more reliable computer in my pocket. As Palms caught on, I blew the owners' minds by IRDA zapping them contact details. The point being that there was a time everyone with an office corporate job carried them. To a lesser extent, Nokia, WinCE, Sony-Ericsson etc. Those gadgets sold in vast numbers, too. I mean, yes, compared to the modern smartphone industry, which is 10-100x the size of the entire PC industry including servers... But "false starts"? $ multi-billion companies with household-name products? I would be extraordinarily happy with a "false start" such as that! It strikes me as like saying bicycles were a false start because more people do more miles in cars.