The History of The Smartphone

From Don Robers: Top mobile phone moguls' state that there is no precise definition of a smartphone and agree that with the industry developing so fast, what we call a smartphone now may be very different in a year's time.

In 1992 IBM produced arguably the first ever smartphone. As a blue sky campaign they created Simon, a concept product exhibited at the Las Vegas trade show Comdex. Simon pre-emanated every Blackberry, iPhone and Android you see now, by boasting a plethora of features including email, fax, world clock, calendar, calculator, address book and even a touch screen. However it did, rather unfashionably resemble a brick.

The next attempt was in 1996 by Nokia with their mobile device called the Communicator. Other than sounding like a bad 80s sci-fi villain, the Nokia Communicator 9210 model was the first smartphone with an open operating system. Unfortunately the astronomically expensive price bracket alienated the majority of the general public who were limited by their more modest salaries. After this the idea of third party applications was introduced, when in 2001 Handspring released the Palm OS
Treo which also featured wireless web browsing, email and contact organiser.

A year later the company Research in Motion launched the original Blackberry and it was at this point that the smartphone reached a wider market. It was still confined to business executives that wanted to take their office everywhere with them, however for the first time there was a mobile device that was optimised for wireless email use and it was this model that set the trend for the rest of the smartphones.

In 2007 Apple released the iPhone, with its intuitive touch screen this was the device that revolutionised mobile web browsing. It was easy to use, enjoyable to navigate with and looked far sexier than all its predecessors. In 2008 the Apple application store was launched for both fee and free apps downloadable to your iPhone handset. Now the store has more than 50,000 applications and well over 1 billion downloads.

Following in Apples popular footsteps all other major smartphone providers will be opening their own app stores, so expect lots from Microsoft, Nokia and Palm. Research in Motion recently opened its first app store called the Blackberry App World. Whether these do as well as Apple is yet to be seen, but with the high level of competition between the major players, we can look forward to some exciting smartphone innovation in the coming years.