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IBM Simon (1994): the original smartphone, explained in its own ad [video]
- bobajeff 1mo agoHow much did this bad boy cost?
- LeoPanthera 1mo agoYou should watch the Apple Newton commercials too: https://youtu.be/lkg4EAK0Y30 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 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.)
- ddoolin 1mo agoThose Newton commercials are awesome, I love that dark humor.
- YZF 1mo agoStill have my Newton. tbh it ended up being a lot less useful then what I imagined it to be. Still a cool toy.
- jjkaczor 1mo agoHeh... I had a 130 (maybe a 120 - I missed-the-boat on getting a 2000)... and a PCMCIA modem card connected to a Motorola flip - I was reading usenet/sending emails online at coffee shops sooooo far ahead of WiFi... ... except in that combination, you could see your battery level dropping in real-time... ... fun times...
- rbanffy 1mo agoIt'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 1mo agoJapan'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 1mo agoIt 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 1mo agoThe 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 1mo agoThere 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 1mo 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- chinagenie_ai 1mo ago[flagged]
- Gravityloss 1mo agoThe 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...
- evo1 1mo agoAbout 2 minutes in they start showing the device being used and it's interface.
- dofm 1mo agoThe 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.
- pavlov 1mo agoIt’s even worse than nobody having seen the Newton: it was actively ridiculed in the press, so a lot of people had never seen it but knew it as a joke. This was a time when newspaper comic strips were still culturally influential because they were syndicated in newspapers across the US. Doonesbury spent several strips making fun of the Newton: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/18/319/1714 https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/...
- dofm 1mo ago
- lovlar 1mo agothat 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.
- tryauuum 1mo agoman the woman in the video says "you got to try it to believe it", didn't you hear it
- shortformblog 1mo agoI 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.
- JKCalhoun 1mo agoI see no reason you couldn't hack an external power supply to run the device. You just need specs on the battery and a bench power supply.
- NetMageSCW 1mo agoI have one in my basement somewhere but I haven’t tried to power it in years. I think it used Nicad batteries so the pack could probably be rebuilt?
- rhplus 1mo agoThey even predicted that smartphone users would inevitably ruin the (movie) theater experience (skip to 3:55 and 4:57)
- flohofwoe 1mo agoWow, this ad is the living proof that the 1990s were just as terrible as any decade that came before or after - we just tend to forget the really horrible stuff (like showcased here, IBM desparately trying to be hip).
- alexthedigger 1mo agoJust an Apple newton but not as good
- pavlov 1mo agoExcept, you know, the whole smartphone part which Newton never had.
- alexthedigger 1mo agoNewton had a pcmcia slot and you could get a phone on it.
- josh-wrale 1mo agoBack 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.
- reaperducer 1mo agoI thought I was living in the future. I'm not sure anymore that I was. You were. But the future got hijacked along the way. I had the same thought about living in the future around 2007 when I was on a hydrofoil skimming across the South China Sea doing payroll on my SonyEricsson M600c. I thought "the future is going to be great!" It isn't.
- kraquepype 1mo agoAs a kid in the early 90s, I remember staying up late to watch the news and there were specials about upcoming technology. I think it was close to the end of the year and they were going over what was in the works for the next year. It was an exciting time, and I cherish those warm memories, that feeling of a wide open future that I was going to be a part of. It feels like I got screwed out of those dreams. Technology framed my life - I loved all of it! Computers, programming, videogames, taking everything I could apart and trying to figure it out and fix it when it failed. I eventually got into IT, and have had a good career. The last couple years - it feels like it's all being taken away. There's a lot more to say, but I wasn't really planning on a super long rant here. Maybe I just wish the enshittification of it all had an ending that didn't feel so bleak.
- alexthedigger 1mo agoSo sad to see what happened to ibm. Now they just milk government contracts.
- ltbarcly3 1mo agoWho is this commercial addressed to? It's so 90's and so hard to watch. It's directly emasculating the people who might have bought this piece of crap.