alt.hn

8/15/2026 at 7:11:47 PM

IBM Simon (1994): the original smartphone, explained in its own ad [video]

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoTFywZpPcc

by kls0e

8/18/2026 at 9:49:22 AM

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.)

by LeoPanthera

8/18/2026 at 3:48:06 PM

Still have my Newton. tbh it ended up being a lot less useful then what I imagined it to be. Still a cool toy.

by YZF

8/18/2026 at 6:33:58 PM

Heh... 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...

by jjkaczor

8/18/2026 at 3:31:37 PM

Those Newton commercials are awesome, I love that dark humor.

by ddoolin

8/18/2026 at 10:05:36 AM

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.

by rbanffy

8/18/2026 at 10:09:24 AM

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.

by pavlov

8/18/2026 at 10:47:46 AM

> 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.

by timthorn

8/18/2026 at 12:05:45 PM

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.

by loloquwowndueo

8/18/2026 at 3:58:03 PM

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.

by cameldrv

8/18/2026 at 1:23:04 PM

> it wasn’t until the Treo series

This was because the acquisition of Handspring, right?

by rbanffy

8/18/2026 at 5:07:59 PM

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?

by loloquwowndueo

8/18/2026 at 10:31:45 AM

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.

by api

8/18/2026 at 1:22:50 PM

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.

by vidarh

8/18/2026 at 1:25:20 PM

> 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.

by rbanffy

8/18/2026 at 10:09:43 PM

You're absolutely right - I mixed them up.

(Incidentally, this is the tablet I worked on: 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)

by vidarh

8/18/2026 at 11:51:06 AM

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 :).

by NikolaNovak

8/18/2026 at 12:13:10 PM

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.

by subpixel

8/18/2026 at 2:40:43 PM

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.

by kstrauser

8/18/2026 at 12:27:06 PM

Don't mind. He probably had a Vx :)

by Bluestein

8/18/2026 at 12:44:32 PM

Yeah, that will do it.

by JKCalhoun

8/19/2026 at 8:09:25 AM

> 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 lproven

8/18/2026 at 3:45:05 PM

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

by YZF

8/18/2026 at 3:19:02 PM

Back 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.

by josh-wrale

8/18/2026 at 4:01:20 PM

I 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.

by reaperducer

8/18/2026 at 4:32:46 PM

As 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.

by kraquepype

8/18/2026 at 11:32:19 AM

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.

by shortformblog

8/18/2026 at 2:22:07 PM

I 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?

by NetMageSCW

8/18/2026 at 12:45:43 PM

I 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.

by JKCalhoun

8/18/2026 at 12:07:52 PM

They even predicted that smartphone users would inevitably ruin the (movie) theater experience (skip to 3:55 and 4:57)

by rhplus

8/18/2026 at 11:45:31 AM

How much did this bad boy cost?

by bobajeff

8/18/2026 at 3:44:50 PM

So sad to see what happened to ibm. Now they just milk government contracts.

by alexthedigger

8/18/2026 at 11:05:09 AM

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...

by Gravityloss

8/18/2026 at 11:21:07 AM

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.

by dofm

8/18/2026 at 1:36:44 PM

It’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/...

by pavlov

8/18/2026 at 2:13:30 PM

One of the more interesting corners of history is the Palm guys settling on honesty as a reaction to that.

You make a system that can do enough that you can teach users to meet it in the middle, and you don't pretend it is magic.

PalmOS and Graffiti in particular is a rare example of tech literally not pretending it is more magical than it actually is. It could do what it claimed, with high accuracy, you had to learn how to use it but it was not burdensome. And with the rest of the Palm Pilot, everyone knew they were carrying around a finely balanced device; useful enough, insane battery life, friendly.

One of the high water marks of tech culture in that decade.

by dofm

8/18/2026 at 4:05:15 PM

it was actively ridiculed in the press

"Eat up, Martha!"

/ob Simpsons

by reaperducer

8/18/2026 at 11:18:36 AM

About 2 minutes in they start showing the device being used and it's interface.

by evo1

8/18/2026 at 12:38:45 PM

I suspect it was rather the combination of cost (around $1000 1990's dollars), weight (>500g) and battery time (apparently only 30 minutes) which was the problem.

> and it looks a bit underwhelming in general

...only from today's perspective.

by flohofwoe

8/18/2026 at 2:10:08 PM

Don't forget size. Didn't reasonably fit in any non coat/jacket pocket.

by archonis

8/18/2026 at 4:21:39 PM

Who 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.

by ltbarcly3

8/18/2026 at 12:37:16 PM

Just an Apple newton but not as good

by alexthedigger

8/18/2026 at 1:37:41 PM

Except, you know, the whole smartphone part which Newton never had.

by pavlov

8/18/2026 at 3:43:19 PM

Newton had a pcmcia slot and you could get a phone on it.

by alexthedigger

8/18/2026 at 11:23:03 AM

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.

by lovlar

8/18/2026 at 5:04:08 PM

man the woman in the video says "you got to try it to believe it", didn't you hear it

by tryauuum

8/18/2026 at 10:15:37 AM

[flagged]

by chinagenie_ai

8/18/2026 at 12:32:00 PM

Wow, 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).

by flohofwoe

8/18/2026 at 12:46:30 PM

You don't miss shoulder-pads?

No?

(But I'll fight you if you think the 1970's were a worse or even a bad decade.)

by JKCalhoun

8/18/2026 at 1:10:44 PM

Ok yes, the 70s were less terrible (only because of Funk and Disco) ;)

by flohofwoe