9in long and weighing 1lb, the world’s first smartphone
ONLY 20 years old, it is already a museum piece. For this clunky mobile can claim to be the world’s first smartphone.
At nine inches long and weighing a hefty 1lb, it dwarfs today’s handsets. And it has a battery life of just one hour.
But the IBM Simon, which went on sale on August 16, 1994, was the first attempt to combine a phone and a personal organiser. As well as making calls, it could send and receive faxes. A primitive stylus-operated green LCD touchscreen allowed users to write notes, draw, log appointments and update contacts.
Costing $899 (about £585 in those days), it was called Simon because it was simple and could do almost anything you wanted. It even had a slot for cartridges, the forerunner of apps. But it was not a success. Even after the price was cut to $599, only 50,000 were sold and it was soon discon- tinued. The device will form part of a permanent exhibition on the history of communication and information technology which opens at the Science Museum in London in October.
It was bought on eBay by the museum for an undisclosed sum. Exhibition content developer Charlotte Connelly said: ‘We are calling it the first smartphone, even though that phrase first came along much later. It didn’t make a massive splash.
‘First it was very expensive, second the battery only lasted an hour, and third there was no mobile internet. Would I like to carry it around? No. But really it was a brilliant idea. It was too far ahead of its time.’
Information Age: Six Networks That Changed Our World is at the Science Museum from October 25.