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From the Simon to the BlackBerry

Martin Cooper with Motorola’s DynaTac prototype in 1973 (Martin Cooper)

On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper dialed his way into history. As the general manager of Motorola’s systems division, he had flown to New York City to unveil a prototype of the world’s first handheld cellphone. The 28-ounce phone, which had a long antenna, a thin body, and a protruding bottom “lip,” making it resemble a boot, isn’t sleek by current standards, but it was revolutionary. Until 1973 a mobile phone required so much power it had to be tethered to a car’s electrical system or an attaché case containing a huge battery. The phone that Cooper and his team had developed—the DynaTAC—fit right in the palm of his hand.

Reporters had gathered at the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan to see the new phone. Cooper was nervous. “There were thousands of parts in the thing; it was hard to keep it running,” he recalls. “We had people at the hotel still working at midnight [the night before] to make sure the phone would be able to make calls.”1 Cooper got lucky. The phone functioned flawlessly that day, both before the press conference when he placed a call from the bustling street in front of a reporter, and later at the event, where he made a number of calls, even letting one young journalist dial her mother in Australia. “At that time, not everyone in the world thought people needed cellphones,” he said, “but the reporters were quite enthusiastic.” Today Cooper is universally acknowledged as the creator of the cellphone and the first person to make a cellphone call in public. His story gave the world a straightforward starting point for understanding cellphone history.

In contrast, there is no consensus on the smartphone’s origins. A number of people think it was born in 2007, when Apple cofounder Steve Jobs proudly showed off the first iPhone at the Macworld conference in San Francisco. But what many people either forget or do not know is that phones with smartphone features had already been on sale for more than a decade.

Some experts believe smartphones emerged from cellphones when manufacturers began squeezing sophisticated programs and Web-browsing features into their handsets. Others say personal digital assistants (PDA), with their touchscreens and open operating systems, were the real progenitors of the smartphone. A third camp thinks pagers and messaging devices, including early BlackBerrys, paved the way by introducing mobile data and e-mail to a broad audience.

The question hangs on how you define a smartphone. Generally speaking, a smartphone distinguishes itself from a cellphone by running on an open operating system that can host applications (apps) written by outside developers. The apps expand the phone’s functionality, giving it computerlike capabilities, and can be downloaded and installed by users, not just pre-installed by smartphone companies. Smartphones also have a number of built-in features that basic phones typically do not, including touchscreens that can sense multiple-finger swipes, high-definition displays, fully Internet-capable browsers, advanced software that automatically grabs new e-mails, and high-quality cameras, music, and video players.

It took more than a decade to cram all these features into one handheld device. The earliest smartphones came from IBM, Nokia, Ericsson, Palm, and Research In Motion/BlackBerry. Though these phones pushed boundaries in the 1990s and early 2000s, they were all limited in some way, especially in their Internet and app access. Most of these early smartphones were not sales hits. Some were famous flops. But all contributed to the smartphones we now carry in our pockets, whether they are iPhones, Android phones, Windows Phones, or BlackBerrys.

IBM AND THE SIMON

IBM’s Simon phone was born of twin desires: a talented engineer’s to tackle the challenge of creating a portable, wirelessly connected computing device and IBM’s to burnish its image by unveiling never before seen, futuristic gadgets. Though the Simon was commercially available for less than a year, many regard it as the world’s first smartphone.

Frank J. Canova Jr. was the gutsy engineer behind the Simon. Gary Wisgo, who was Canova’s engineering manager at IBM, says Canova had two rare abilities. In an industry known for its narrow specializations, Canova was skilled at both hardware and software. He also had a knack for seeing the future. “A lot of engineers just sit and design circuits; a lot of programmers just sit and design programs,” says Wisgo. “Frank would look out at the industry, see what other companies were doing, and say, ‘We should do this.’”

The early 1990s were a fertile time for dreaming up portable, wireless gizmos. Advances in microprocessor chips and other components made it possible to shrink computers into mobile devices. PCMCIA cards—credit card–sized “personal computer memory cards” that could expand a computer’s storage or functionality—were sparking new ideas about computing capabilities. Cellular service was expanding across the country. And carriers were planning network upgrades that would make it easier to send and receive data on mobile devices.

Anticipating a lucrative new market, technology companies started concocting next-generation computing products. Apple was stealthily developing its Newton PDA and had publicly confessed an interest in wireless devices. AT&T was funding a start-up to create the EO, a PDA-tablet hybrid with a built-in cellular modem. IBM, which had produced PCs for a decade, was also investigating computer miniaturization and wireless connectivity, in its research lab in Boca Raton, Florida.

Canova worked in that lab as a senior technical staff member on IBM’s advanced technology team. In mid-1992, the 35-year-old was experimenting with touch-sensitive glass panels that snapped onto the front of computer monitors. He decided to try making a touchscreen version of a phone keypad, using a computer monitor, a glass touchscreen overlay, and Microsoft’s Visual Basic computer programming language. Within a few days Canova had a touch-responsive mock-up of the keypad—and a plan. He started talking to IBM management about creating a touchscreen handheld device that would combine calling and computing features.

IBM was game. It had recently kicked off a corporate initiative called Vision 95, which aimed to predict what computers, electronics, and computing services would look like in 1995. As part of the initiative, Jerry Merckel, an IBM manager who specialized in strategic planning, commissioned sleek wood-and-plastic models of Canova’s phone concept and a set of matching PCMCIA cards. Dubbing it “tomorrow’s computer,” he explained how the cards would transform the phone into a camera, or a music player or game player. Intrigued, Paul Mugge, who was an IBM vice president and the general manager of the Boca Raton office, approved funding.

Model PCMCIA cards used in internal IBM presentations to obtain funding for the Simon project. Inserting the cards would expand the phone’s functionality by adding GPS, camera, TV, and radio capabilities. (Jerry Merckel)

Canova set about designing a device that would be a phone first and a computer second. “We wanted using it to be natural, like a [landline] phone, where you just lift the handset and dial numbers,” he explains. “Unlike a computer, you wouldn’t have to boot it or configure it.” The phone’s touchscreen design supported that ethos. Because touchscreens are thinner than built-in keyboards, users would be able to operate the device with one hand, like a regular phone. While tinkering with the touchscreen, Canova came to another realization: the phone’s menu should be arranged like a computer’s, with small icons for launching applications.

When IBM management saw Canova’s touchscreen demos, they decided to include the phone in the company’s technology showcase at the upcoming 1992 Computer Dealers’ Exhibition (COMDEX)—then the computer industry’s largest trade show, which was held in Las Vegas each November. IBM’s mainframe business was collapsing, because its corporate clients were shifting their computing to lower-cost personal computers, and the company wanted to portray at least a portion of the company as still vibrant.

The phone project became a five-person effort. Wisgo says he was the manager, but Canova was the visionary. Wisgo’s team had just 14 weeks to transform Canova’s lab work into a prototype for COMDEX. The phone could make calls using a radio module IBM had sourced from Motorola, but the team still had to design the circuit board and find manufacturers for the touchscreen and battery. “Half of the device was in my mind; the other half was in pieces, splayed on a bench,” Canova remembers. Writing software to support the phone’s various functions was the most demanding task. Besides making calls, the phone needed to be able to send and receive e-mails, store the user’s calendar and address book, and host a calculator. Users also needed to be able to move fluidly between the different features by switching screens—an early version of mobile multitasking. The team worked 80-hour weeks to meet the deadline. “We lived at the lab day and night,” says Wisgo. “It was one of the most trying periods in my life.” Canova, who was a new father, brought his infant son to the lab on weekends so he could squeeze in time with him.

Glitches with the phone’s code continued right up to COMDEX. “People would ask, ‘Should we pull it?’ and I’d say, ‘Keep going,’” Mugge remembers. “We didn’t have a backup plan.” The team pressed on. On the first day of the trade show, after successfully demonstrating the phone’s calling and e-mail features, attendees mobbed the IBM booth to get a closer look at the device. That week, USA Today published two articles highlighting the phone. The first marveled at the speed with which IBM developed the device. The second featured a photo of Canova holding it and described IBM’s COMDEX demo as “seemingly flawless.”2

Encouraged by the media attention, IBM agreed to fund the creation of a real product, and soon after, the Atlanta-based carrier BellSouth expressed interest in carrying it. IBM had been calling it a “personal communicator,” but BellSouth named the phone Simon, after the children’s game Simon Says and the electronic memory game that was popular in the late 1970s and 1980s. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, BellSouth’s marketing managers thought the name “evoked simplicity” and would be easy for consumers to remember.³

IBM Simon (Wikimedia)

Targeting an April 1994 release, IBM’s Simon team swelled from 5 people to more than 30. Taking the phone from a prototype to a real product was challenging. Motorola refused to supply the phone’s radios, explaining it would be “counterstrategic” for them to help IBM build a commercial smartphone, according to Wisgo. IBM got a replacement part from Mitsubishi, the Japanese electronics manufacturer, but the swap delayed the entire project.

The Simon team also wrestled with the phone’s size and battery. The brick-shaped device ended up measuring 8 inches by 2.5 inches by 1.5 inches and weighing 18 ounces. “It was clunky, and we knew it, but we couldn’t get it any smaller at the time,” says Canova. Battery life was the single toughest issue. It topped out at an hour of talk time or eight hours of standby time, so IBM provided BellSouth with a thicker, double-capacity battery to sell separately. “We could have put a huge battery on [the Simon], but no one would have bought it,” explains Wisgo. “It was too big already.”

The Simon launched four months later than planned, at a price of $899. It boasted an advanced set of features. It supported multiple forms of communication: calls, e-mail, faxes, and pager messages. It had a “graphical user interface,” meaning it was image- and icon-based. To navigate between phone, fax, and calendar functions, users simply touched the appropriate icons on the touchscreen, and they could customize their phones’ features and functions by inserting different PCMCIA cards, similar to the way apps expand smartphone functionality today. The phone even included password protection, a note pad feature that saved typed memos, a world clock, and a puzzle-piece game called Scrabble^®.

These features have since become commonplace in smartphones, but in the early 1990s they were unusual and, to some people, intimidating. BellSouth tried to counteract confusion by advertising the Simon as “Mobile Communications Made Simple,”4 but news articles described the phone as everything from a portable computer to a “processor-based telephone”5 to an “enhanced telephone and messaging unit.”⁶ Reviews tended to commend the phone’s advanced features without advising people to buy it. PC Magazine said the Simon was “an impressive feat of integration” but cautioned that “while Simon is definitely much more than a phone, it’s still not quite a PC.”⁷

BellSouth sold fewer than 50,000 units of the Simon before the phone was discontinued in 1995. IBM, still in financial trouble, had already begun downsizing the Simon team. “It was a time of enormous restructuring,” explains Mugge. “There was just no room or time for these forays into the future.” Canova left IBM in 1994 when the company started closing the Boca Raton lab and moving projects to other locations. By then Canova had designed a successor to the Simon—the Neon, which was much smaller and had a unique “tilt sensor” that would rotate the screen when the phone was turned sideways. IBM tried to continue developing the Neon, but the project floundered due to limited resources and loss of talent.

The Simon was an innovation doomed by bad timing. It missed IBM’s golden age of the 1980s. It also employed first-generation (1G) analog technology right before the United States moved to faster 2G digital networks. While analog cellphone networks were designed to support only voice communications, 2G networks enabled greater flexibility and efficiency in terms of mobile services and bandwidth usage, allowing carriers to serve more subscribers and cellphones to last longer on a single charge, among other benefits. The Simon was the first e-mail-capable phone, but sending and receiving e-mails on a 1G network could be tedious, as users had to dial in to a remote computer via a built-in modem, and then wait to download and upload messages. “Carriers hadn’t gotten into digital networks yet, so we were trying to push data over an analog network, which is really never ideal,” says Canova.

Popular Science pointed out the problem: “Like most cellular phones, Simon is an analog communications device that’s subject to interference problems and spotty coverage outside urban areas. Digital cellular phones and services . . . are much better suited for sending messages and faxes. . . . For all of its futuristic touches, Simon is still firmly rooted in the limitations of today.”⁸

Another cutting-edge feature the Simon didn’t get to properly show off: its ability to support apps. Mugge believed the Simon would inspire developers to create PCMCIA cards “with all kinds of interesting functions” just like IBM’s PCs had “attracted the minds and talents of people all over the world.” But BellSouth and IBM didn’t establish a formal Simon app development program. “Anybody who wanted to make an app had to jump through more hoops than common people would be willing to do,” acknowledges Canova. Only one company outside IBM made the effort: an Atlanta-based software firm called PDA Dimensions. The app, called DispatchIt, was intended as a way for field service teams to keep a log of their work. It was useful but extremely expensive: it cost $299, and the corresponding PC software cost $2,999.9

The next smartphones would be 2G phones. With their speedier digital network connections, smaller dimensions, and more advanced features, these phones would fare better than the ill-fated Simon. And it was in Europe that they would first emerge.

FROM THE UNITED STATES TO EUROPE

Change is a constant in smartphone history. A company and geographic region will lead innovation for some years, but a challenger always emerges to overtake them.

In the pre-smartphone era the United States spearheaded the development of cellphone technology. Bell Labs, AT&T’s former R&D division, started formulating the principles of cellular networks in the 1940s and continued through the 1970s. Motorola, under Martin Cooper, kept the United States at the forefront of the technology in the 1970s by conceiving the first portable cellphone. But the United States lost momentum because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took nearly a decade to decide which companies would get licenses to offer commercial cellular networks. AT&T was lobbying for the privilege, but so were Motorola and its corporate partners. “The question was, ‘Is the government going to consider cellular to be part of the phone system, which was an AT&T monopoly at the time, and give [the radio frequency] to AT&T or try to do something different, which Motorola and its customers were urging?’” says Sheldon Hochheiser, the institutional historian at the IEEE History Center, a nonprofit that preserves and promotes electrical engineering and computing history. Motorola and AT&T’s rivalry was, in fact, the catalyst for the DynaTAC and Cooper’s now famous April 1973 press conference. “Back then, AT&T had enormous power and Motorola was a little company; we had to build up some credibility,” explains Cooper.

In 1974, the issue moved further into the political arena when the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T that eventually forced the company to break up its Bell system. In the end, the FCC decided that each market, which basically meant each metropolitan area, should have two cellular licenses—one for an incumbent landline carrier, such as AT&T (which passed its licenses to its regional subsidiaries after its 1984 breakup), and one for a company, such as Motorola, that wasn’t a traditional carrier. “It was strictly politics,” recalls Richard Frenkiel, a former Bell Labs employee who helped pioneer cellular-system engineering with Joel Engel, another Bell Labs engineer.10 “We had a working system [in Chicago] in 1978, but it didn’t go commercial until 1983, because people were arguing about an AT&T monopoly.”

Frenkiel has described that Chicago system as the world’s “first true cellular system” and capable of “huge capacity,”¹¹ but while the FCC deliberated, northern Europe pulled ahead. In 1981, Norway and Sweden activated their first cellphone networks. Denmark and Finland followed in 1982. Cellphones were an ideal way for Scandinavian countries to connect their far-flung residents across long distances and heavy snow, because cellular networks are cheaper to build than landline phone networks. The disadvantage was that these early cellular networks were often incompatible with each other. “Most European countries had slight variations in their 1G networks,” says Nigel Linge, a telecommunications professor and historian at the University of Salford in Britain. “If you had a mobile phone in England in the 1980s, it stopped working at the English Channel.” Since Europeans frequently cross national borders, they quickly realized they needed a pan-European cellular technology.

A mobile telecommunications standard outlines the technical way cellphones interact with networks so subscribers’ calls and data can be processed and transmitted, and in 1987, 13 European countries, including Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, agreed to adopt a standard called GSM, which has come to mean Global System for Mobile communications, for their 2G networks. Europe then deftly navigated the transition from 1G to 2G networks, launching 2G/GSM ones in 1991, earlier than any other region of the world. The rest soon followed, as GSM became the de facto global standard, and by 1997, 108 countries across the world had commercial GSM networks up and running.

In contrast, U.S. carriers didn’t deploy 2G until 1995, and U.S. regulators took a free market approach, letting each carrier decide which 2G standard it would use. Some American carriers chose GSM, but Sprint, and the carriers that later merged to become Verizon Wireless, chose a competing standard called code division multiple access (CDMA)—a newer technology than GSM that offered carriers greater capacity, so they could serve more subscribers. The arrival of 2G unified the European wireless industry but fragmented that of the United States.

European standardization helped Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia grab early leads over Motorola in 2G cellphones and smartphones. GSM enabled European phone makers to sell in many countries without major modifications, and the prospect of international high-volume sales was a great incentive to innovate. Advanced networks also made device innovation easier in Europe, since European carriers were eager to offer sophisticated phones that would highlight their networks’ benefits.

By the mid-1990s, nearly one out of every three Finns and Swedes owned cellphones, which was more than twice the rate for Americans and the rest of Europe. In 1997, the New York Times declared Finland the “most wired nation in the world,” citing its enthusiastic adoption of cellphones, the Internet, and online services, and attributed Finland’s leadership in communications technology to its “high educational levels, the government’s spending in basic research, and the long winter nights.”12 Both Finland and Sweden also had competitive wireless markets (which reduced cellular service prices for consumers), strong engineering traditions, and a focus on economic growth through exports, due to their relatively small populations.

Nokia and Ericsson

Jari Kiuru joined Nokia in 1995 without knowing what he would be doing. Nokia would only say it was “building something unique that no one had seen before.” The project was based in Tampere, an inland city several hours from Nokia’s main offices in Helsinki. Almost everyone on the team was in their early to midtwenties. “Nobody was selected because they had prior experience,” says Kiuru. The team was charged with creating a phone-PDA hybrid, something that Nokia had been thinking about since the early 1990s. Kiuru initially served as a product manager, but within a few months he was promoted to program manager, which meant he oversaw the project’s entire development, from R&D to manufacturing to marketing. The group’s first product was the Nokia 9000 Communicator—a 6.8-inch-long, 14-ounce éclair-shaped device that looked like a chubby cellphone when closed but opened to reveal a PDA, with a large, 4.5-inch screen and a built-in QWERTY keyboard that had letter keys laid out in the same configuration as a standard English-language computer keyboard.

Nokia Communicator 9000 (textlad/Flickr)

Nokia didn’t consider the 9000 Communicator to be a smartphone—a term that was already in circulation, although its meaning varied. Companies, including AT&T, had first used the term in the 1980s to describe landline phones that had special features. Those noncellular smartphones included voice-controlled office phones that could dial preset numbers when commanded and home phones that had built-in modems and touchscreens so users could check their bank account balances, transfer funds, and pay bills. When manufacturers began giving cellphones handheld computer features, people started calling them smartphones, too. So when Nokia dubbed the 9000 a “communicator,” it was attempting to create a new product category that would rank it above smartphones in price and functionality. “A smartphone was just a phone with advanced functionality,” says Kiuru. “Communicator sounded like a miniature computer that was advanced in communications.” It also had the futuristic ring of the voice communication devices used on Star Trek.

In many respects the Communicator was a refined, more powerful version of the Simon. It weighed 0.9 pounds and was almost seven inches long, which made it slightly lighter and shorter than the Simon. Both phones could support apps, send faxes and e-mails, and store information, such as contact lists, notes, and calendars. The Communicator could also do things the Simon couldn’t, such as browse the Web and run third-party apps built with a software development kit (SDK). Kiuru says the latter feature qualifies the Communicator as the “first genuine advanced smartphone,” since releasing an SDK to help outsiders write apps would later become standard practice.

The Communicator’s myriad features and functions helped it stand out but also made it much more difficult to produce. While a typical cellphone at that time had 25 to 30 component suppliers, the Communicator had 250. And while a typical cellphone had 100 to 150 discrete components, the Communicator had 1,080. To make the phone as compact as possible, Nokia devised a seven-layer circuit board, which solved another problem: some smartphone chips emit signals and can interfere with each other if placed too close together. The multiple-layer circuit board separated the chips with layers of a nonconductive material, such as plastic, instead of large amounts of space.13 But the board was so complicated to build that a fabrication mix-up brought the entire Communicator project to a halt less than two months before its scheduled launch. “In early July 1996, everything stopped working,” recalls Kiuru. “You couldn’t even make a phone call.”

It was a setback Nokia couldn’t afford. To drum up press and public interest in the Communicator Nokia had announced the phone’s on-sale date and time (August 15, 1996, at noon) five months in advance. Publications including The Times of London had mentioned it in articles,14 and Nokia management was intent on meeting its highly publicized deadline. Kiuru’s team started retracing their steps to locate their mistake. Late one night a sharp-eyed radio design engineer pinpointed the problem: the manufacturer Nokia had hired to produce the circuit board had flipped one of the seven layers upside down by mistake.

The Communicator team recovered from that episode and delivered the phone in time for an unusually flashy, London-based launch that included a public drawing for a deeply discounted Communicator and paid appearances by British athletes who had won medals at the 1996 Olympic Games. Reviewers marveled at the device’s features even while balking at the $1,500 price tag and its size. Barron’s highlighted its “seriously high gee-whiz quotient,”¹⁵ while Reuters noted, “The Communicator puts more power in the palm of your hand than most business computers put on your desktop just a few years ago.”¹⁶ The Times wrote, “It may not be particularly pretty, but it is almost certainly the most advanced mobile phone in the world.”¹⁷

In 1997, Nokia decided to bring a variant of the 9000 Communicator to the United States—the 9000i Communicator, which had updated software and could operate on American GSM networks. Six months later the sleeker and lighter 9000il Communicator debuted and became Nokia’s new flagship U.S. device. Even with a redesign, the 9000il was an elaborate-looking GSM phone, which made it a hard sell in the United States, where GSM was yet to be established nationwide. It didn’t help either that Americans were also still wedded to their pagers. Some U.S. carriers did buy the phone, but only in small volumes, so they could test it among their high-end business customers. To spur business interest in the 9000il, Nokia ran ads in the Wall Street Journal touting the phone’s corporate features and portability. They informed readers that the 9000il would let them “update [their] stock portfolios over lunch” and send a fax while sipping their “morning latte grande.”18

The Communicator met with more success in Europe. In late August 1996, Nokia’s then CEO, Jorma Ollila, said the company was “shipping [all the Communicators] we can make,”¹⁹ which amounted to tens of thousands of units a week, to European carriers.

Nokia’s other Communicator-related accomplishment was that it released a smartphone before its main rivals, Ericsson and Motorola. “We knew Ericsson was trying to develop something similar,” says Kiuru, and he was right. Nils Rydbeck, the chief technology officer of Ericsson’s mobile phone division from 1985 to 2001, says Ericsson started thinking about smartphones in 1995 and began developing them in 1997. Ericsson called its smartphone strategy “the melting pot,” which basically meant future phones would be amalgams of several gadgets, such as cameras, computers, and music players. “All these surrounding devices would go into the mixture and come out in a mobile phone as something new,” says Rydbeck.

Ericsson launched its melting pot smartphone, the R380, in 2000. It improved on the original Communicator in a few ways. It was much cheaper, with a price of around $600. It was also much smaller—more than 1.5 inches shorter and less than half the weight of the 9000 Communicator. Instead of a built-in QWERTY keyboard, the R380 had a narrow, 12-button keypad that flipped open to reveal a touchscreen and a full, virtual keyboard. When held horizontally, the R380 screen measured 3.3 inches long and 1.3 inches high, giving users adequate room to view Web pages or the phone’s address book, calendar, and note pad features. “The idea was to introduce the idea of a smartphone to people who were used to normal phones,” says Rydbeck.

Kevin Lloyd, a former Ericsson global product manager who helped sell the R380 to carriers, thinks the phone was released too early. “It was nicely designed and had tremendous potential, but it was this kind of ‘almost product,’” he recalls. “Companies were always asking for just one more iteration of the software, one more set of capabilities, before they would adopt it.” Rydbeck acknowledges the phone could be “clumsy” but says Ericsson primarily wanted to test the smartphone market. He estimates the company sold at most “a couple hundred thousand” R380s. Nevertheless, the Guardian called it “a masterpiece of miniaturization”20 while Popular Science named it one of the year’s top 100 products.²¹

Ericsson R380s (Tor Björn Minde/Ericsson)

The Ericsson R380s was the first smartphone to have retail packaging that said “Smartphone” on it. (Alex Bucher/www.oldericsson.ch)

The R380 set a number of important smartphone precedents. It was one of the first post-Simon phones with a touchscreen. It was the first phone to run a very early version of the mobile-specific operating system Symbian, which would become a smartphone staple in the following decade. The R380 was also one of the first phones to use a technical standard called wireless application protocol (WAP) that streamlined Web pages for faster loading and easier viewing on phones.

The R380 was also the first smartphone to be explicitly marketed as a smartphone. Ericsson initially used “Smart Phone” to describe its GS88 phone, which looked similar to a Nokia 9000 Communicator. Ericsson created a GS88 prototype in 1997 and even designed its retail packaging—a box that said Smart Phone on its cover—but the company never publicly released the phone. “Weight was a little bit of an issue, and maybe the battery was not so great,” recalls Tor Björn Minde, a longtime Ericsson employee who now serves as the company’s head of research. “So it was probably decided to make [the GS88] smaller, to be the R380,” which then became the first smartphone-branded phone. Says Rydbeck, “It was a good name for a new kind of phone that was more than a phone, that was also a camera, a music player, a Web browser, and a gaming machine.”

PALM AND HANDSPRING

By the time mobile computing pioneer Jeff Hawkins established Palm Computing in 1992, he had several years of experience behind him: he had worked first at the chip maker Intel and then at a start-up called GRiD Systems, which made some of the world’s first laptops and tablet computers. When he founded Palm Computing, he had a mission: billions of people would eventually carry mobile computers in their pocket, and he wanted Palm to build them.

After some missteps, Palm took a big stride toward that goal in 1996 when it launched the Pilot 1000 and 5000—the first PDAs Palm designed on its own rather than with a consortium of companies. The Pilot 5000 supported five times as much data and cost more than the Pilot 1000 ($369 versus $299), but both were 4.7-inch-long devices that let users save and access addresses, appointments, to-do lists, and memos, and to synchronize that information with that on their computers. The screens also had a touch-sensitive panel people could use to input data via a penlike stylus and a handwriting recognition system called Graffiti, which used simplified letter shapes that Hawkins had invented a few years earlier.

The Pilots won acclaim for being smaller, lighter, easier to use, and cheaper than previous PDAs, but Hawkins soon recognized that future PDAs would also need to include phone functionality. “Some time in 1997 or 1998, it dawned on me that cellphones and handheld computers were on a collision course,” he explains. “PDAs and smartphones were all just a continuum of stuff in the same long-term mission of mobile computing.”

By this time Palm had been acquired by U.S. Robotics, which was in turn acquired by networking equipment maker 3Com. The relationship between 3Com and Palm was awkward from the beginning, and so after 3Com refused to spin out Palm as a separate entity, Hawkins departed, along with Palm’s president and CEO, Donna Dubinsky. Palm’s head of marketing, Ed Colligan, soon joined them, and the trio established a company called Handspring in Mountain View, California, which produced a series of PDAs called Visor. The Visors ran Palm’s operating system (Palm OS), which Handspring licensed from Palm.

Hawkins knew Handspring would need to offer smartphones to remain competitive. He also knew the start-up couldn’t afford to produce a risky, complicated product. Handspring’s solution was to include microphones inside its Visor PDAs and expansion slots in their backs. Sliding a cartridge called a “Springboard” into the slot would imbue the PDA with additional functionality, including phone calls.

In September 1999, Handspring launched its first Visors, at prices ranging from $149 to $249. About a year later, Visors became phones when Handspring introduced a $299 VisorPhone cartridge it built with the help of the Belgian radio technology company Option International. The module included a speaker, an earpiece, and an antenna that allowed users to make and receive calls. Users could also check e-mail and browse the Web, because the VisorPhone doubled as a wireless modem.

Reviews were mixed. Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal’s former gadget reviewer, called the VisorPhone “a clever gizmo” and “a good choice for cutting down the clutter”22 of carrying both a cellphone and a PDA. Ed Baig, the USA Today gadget columnist, described it as a “hybrid telephone solution that, while far from perfect, is the best I have seen.”²³ But one New York Times article said, “It’s difficult to imagine most self-respecting executives talking into their organizers,” adding that the semicircular VisorPhone cartridge made the PDA “look as if it’s wearing a beanie.”²⁴ Handspring sold fewer than 50,000 VisorPhones, even after slashing the module’s price to $49 in 2001. Nonetheless, it gained experience in radios and wireless data, and Handspring’s next big leap would be to real smartphones.

Handspring VisorPhone (Waldohreule/Wikimedia)

BLACKBERRY

In 2002, a smartphone appeared with an entirely different lineage. It was the BlackBerry 5810, a wireless handheld-plus-phone made by Research In Motion (RIM).

RIM was founded by Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin in 1984. The two had been friends since grade school in Windsor, Canada, united by their zeal for tinkering with gadgets. In high school, they built a basic computer together and found a mentor in their technical-shop teacher, who advised them not to get “too hooked” on computers because “Someday the person who puts wireless and computers together is really going to make something.”25 Both Lazaridis and Fregin went on to become engineering students, but Lazaridis dropped out of the University of Waterloo to develop the business that would become RIM and convinced Fregin to join him as cofounder. Lazaridis never forgot the advice of his high-school teacher, and by 1987 he had turned his attention to the emerging field of wireless data. After spending years building wireless modems for handheld devices and laptop computers, RIM launched its first pager in 1996. It was the world’s first pocket-sized, two-way messaging pager and it allowed users to both send and receive messages wirelessly. Two years later, RIM followed with a smaller, lighter wireless e-mail device that had a screen capable of displaying eight lines of text, a trackwheel for navigating the pager’s menu, and a QWERTY keyboard designed for “thumb typing.”

Journalists and consumers often referred to the device as a PDA because it also had organizer features, such as a calendar, address book, and to-do list. RIM called it the RIM Inter@ctive Pager 950, and later the RIM 950 Wireless Handheld, but soon adopted a catchier name for its mobile devices: BlackBerry. The name was the creation of the California marketing firm Lexicon Branding that had also named Intel’s Pentium line of microprocessors and General Motors’s OnStar in-car communications system. Lexicon believed the name should be “colorful and connotative rather than dull and descriptive”²⁶ and thought RIM’s devices, with their small, slanted, oval buttons, resembled a strawberry. But since “straw” is a slow-sounding syllable, and Lexicon’s research had found that the letter B implied “reliability” to consumers, the firm recommended RIM use BlackBerry instead.²⁷

As RIM grew, Fregin took less of a leading role than Lazaridis, who from 1992 shared CEO duties with the more business-minded Jim Balsillie. Like Hawkins, Lazaridis anticipated that wireless handhelds/PDAs and cellphones would converge, and in the late 1990s, he began talking to RIM employees about gaining a seat at the “MENS table,” meaning Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, and Siemens.* Needing something big to break into the phone market, RIM decided to make the first North American PDA that could support both GSM and a recently introduced data technology called “general packet radio service” (GPRS).

First introduced in 2000, GPRS is a technology that carriers laid on top of their GSM networks to enable faster data rates. Dubbed 2.5G, GPRS divides data files, such as e-mails, into smaller digital units called “packets” that can be transmitted more efficiently, letting carriers charge subscribers for the amount of data they use rather than for the amount of time they spend online. The setup enabled GPRS users to stay online all the time, saving them the hassle of dialing up an Internet connection when they wanted to send an e-mail or check for new mail. RIM’s previous messaging devices had a similar “always on” capability, but that was because they operated on paging networks built to quickly deliver wireless messages. GPRS made it possible to offer that experience on a cellular network.

BlackBerry 5810 (Steven Tom/Flickr)

Once RIM set the goal of being first, it raced to release the 5810. To speed development it used the same plastic exterior casing as an earlier BlackBerry, so the 5810 resembled a PDA—a thin, 4.6-inch-long slab with a large, monochrome screen and a QWERTY keyboard. RIM also created different phone models for the United States and Europe because figuring out how to make one phone that could function in both regions would have taken longer. (The European version of the 5810 was called the 5820 and had different radios compatible with European GSM/GPRS networks.) RIM took another shortcut by not integrating a microphone or speaker into the 5810. Instead, it shipped the device with an in-ear headset, which users had to plug into the 5810 to make or answer calls. “It was a time-to-market trade-off made versus getting it absolutely right,” says a RIM insider who worked on the project. “We were splashing into the market as the first and not the best, initially. We would build up to the best.”

RIM promoted the $549 device as a “breakthrough in wireless convergence” that “lets you manage all of your business communications and information from a single, integrated wireless handheld.”28 Reviewers were less laudatory. Though eWEEK noted that the device “heeds [people’s] call for fewer gadgets”²⁹ by enabling users to carry one device instead of two, PC Magazine called the 5810 a “not-so-convenient combo communicator”³⁰ and Forbes magazine said answering calls caused a “paroxysm of fumbling”³¹ to get the earbud/mike combo in place.

The phone had other unexpected issues. European consumers considered the belt holsters RIM shipped with the 5820 to be deeply unstylish and refused to wear them. Without the protective holster, dust could collect in the device’s earphone jack, which could affect audio quality. “That was a use-case that we just didn’t put through its paces [before launch],” admits the RIM alum.

RIM was unfazed. The BlackBerry 5810/5820 accomplished the important task of introducing RIM to carriers as business partners. Approximately 20 carriers across North America, Europe, and Asia agreed to sell the phone. One year later, RIM launched the BlackBerry 6210, which had a built-in microphone and speaker, and by then 50 carriers supported BlackBerrys.

The BlackBerry’s seemingly instantaneous ability to receive and send e-mail provoked a level of user devotion that no other cellphone or smartphone had managed to inspire. In 1999 Lazaridis told a Reuters reporter, “People describe it as addictive. I’m addicted to this thing. Everyone in the company’s addicted to this thing.”32 By 2000, major news outlets, including the business news channel CNBC, Forbes, and Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, were using the term “Crackberry.” The following year, USA Today took the Crackberry phenomenon mainstream with a long article entitled “BlackBerry: The ‘heroin of mobile computing.’”³³

In 2009 and part of 2010, at RIM’s peak, the company controlled 20 percent of the global smartphone market, more than 50 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, had the top-selling smartphone brand in the United States, and shipped as many as 15 million phones per quarter. Though RIM’s market share started sliding in late 2010—and hasn’t stopped—BlackBerrys made their mark. Today all smartphone users expect their phones to have preinstalled e-mail “clients,” or programs that fetch, send, and manage their messages.

RIM also built the first instant-message chat service for smartphones, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). Today smartphone messaging apps are big business, with the most popular ones generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenues. Though ones such as WhatsApp, which Facebook acquired in 2014, have many more features than the original BBM, they began with or quickly adopted the same basic idea: to be an always-on messaging service that lets users send unlimited messages for free or at a very low cost.

THE TREO

RIM had good reason to speed the 5810 to market. In 2002, Handspring began selling a smartphone line called Treo that would eventually replace its Visor series. Treos consolidated three gadgets—a phone, a wireless e-mail/messaging device, and a PDA—into a single device. As Hawkins recalls, “RIM was a potential competitor to us. We decided not to compete with them on the pager front but to go right to phones from PDAs. We knew RIM was going to end up in the phone space eventually too, [and the smartphone market was] the market that mattered.”

Handspring announced its first Treo—the Treo 180—in October 2001, several months before the public even knew about the BlackBerry 5810. But since RIM rushed the 5810’s release, the two phones went on sale around the same time, in early 2002.* Handspring and RIM, and their phones, had two major differences. Handspring was more focused on small and medium businesses and “mobile professionals”³⁴ who bought their own phones. RIM primarily sold BlackBerrys to financial services firms, corporations, and government agencies. These enterprises purchased not only devices: they also paid a per-user fee for RIM’s BlackBerry enterprise server software system, which enabled secure delivery of e-mails to their employees’ BlackBerrys.

Handspring Treo 180 (John Markos O’Neill/Flickr)

Unlike the BlackBerry, the Treo 180 looked like a phone—a big flip phone. While it had a large, monochrome screen like a PDA, the Treo 180 also sported a stubby antenna and a hinged lid that flipped up to serve as an earpiece for phone calls. At 4.3 inches by 2.7 inches by 0.7 inches, the Treo 180 was about the size of a sardine can; it was larger than a regular cellphone but shorter than a PDA.

USA Today’s Ed Baig described the Treo 180 as “pretty slick” and “cool-looking.”35 The Washington Post said it was “surprisingly elegant.”³⁶ But the design was the result of much compromise between Handspring and the carriers. Selling smartphones in significant numbers in the United States and many other countries required the support of the carriers, which dominated the smartphone retail market and subsidized device prices to make them more attractive to consumers. This system gave carriers substantial authority over cellphone and smartphone design.

Prior to the Treo, Handspring had sold the VisorPhone on its own website, but it wanted carriers to stock the Treo like they did other phones. Those agreements required negotiations that Hawkins found frustrating. “All of a sudden I couldn’t build products I wanted to build,” he says. “I had to build the products the carriers wanted to sell.” Hawkins initially wanted Treos to have large touchscreens, like his PDAs: “My original thought was, these things shouldn’t have keys. It should be all display, because you want to see information on it.” Carriers disagreed, and they reminded Hawkins that cellphones had always had keypads, and consumers were used to them.

Carriers preferred the traditional, 12-key keypads that cellphones had used since the 1980s. Hawkins decided to put a BlackBerry-style keyboard on the Treo 180 instead. RIM’s early BlackBerry keyboards were too wide to fit on a phone, so Handspring gave its version smaller keys and positioned the keys closer together. “RIM gets credit for inventing the thumb keyboard,” says Hawkins. “We improved on it.” But in September 2002 RIM sued Handspring for patent infringement. About six weeks later Handspring agreed to license RIM’s keyboard patents for an undisclosed amount of money.

Keyboard issues were just one of the challenges the Treo 180 presented Handspring. Besides negotiating with carriers, Handspring had to strike licensing deals with network infrastructure and device makers that owned important wireless technology patents, learn about cellphone antennae, hire manufacturers to provide the phone’s chipset and radio, and navigate cellphone radiation regulations. Hawkins says the stresses of producing the 180 almost killed the start-up. “It was so hard, and there was so much cost involved, and there were so many obstacles to overcome, it felt like it could put us out of business,” he recalls.

People liked the Treo 180 for its relative compactness, and at $399 it was also more affordable than rival devices. But the phone’s reviews were better than its sales, which, according to Dubinsky’s records, were about 59,000 units. “It was not a failure, but it wasn’t a rollicking success, either,” says Hawkins. Handspring would keep refining the Treo concept, giving later Treos color screens, ditching the hinged lid, and shrinking the phone’s overall size. In 2003, these efforts would come together in the Treo 600, a narrower, bar-shaped phone that tech publications such as CNET have named one of the most iconic smartphones ever.37

The Treo’s other smartphone legacy was its open platform and strong developer relationships. Since Hawkins viewed the Treo (and the Visor and Palm’s Pilots before it) as a minicomputer, he gave his devices open operating systems (Palm OS) and released free SDKs to outside developers, so they could build apps. “Desktop computers had thriving developer communities,” he points out. “That was my model.” So when the Treo 180 launched, it was compatible with more than 11,000 apps. Though not as technologically sophisticated as modern smartphone apps, those of the Palm OS addressed many of the same user needs as today’s, such as editing photos, organizing grocery lists, and providing maps of the New York City subway system. At the time Palm had more than 175,000 developers worldwide, ranging from high school students to companies, and Handspring had more than 10,000 of its own registered developers. Treos were far ahead of BlackBerrys in this respect. RIM never became a developer favorite, and the BlackBerry’s lack of compelling apps would later limit its consumer appeal.

SYMBIAN AND WINDOWS MOBILE

In 1998, a new platform entered the arena to compete with the BlackBerrys and Treos—Symbian, which Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia purchased from British mobile computing company Psion. After establishing itself in the early 1980s as a maker of games and other software for computers, Psion started making handheld electronic organizers, which it also called “palmtop computers,” in 1984. In contrast to American PDAs, which mostly featured touchscreens, Psion organizers had generously sized, built-in keyboards, and by 1987 they had their own operating system, called EPOC. Early Psion models resembled calculators; later ones resembled tiny laptops.

Psion organizers quickly attracted a cult following for their portability, wealth of third-party apps, and computing capabilities, which included word processing and spreadsheet programs. “They were really serious computers and a favorite of people in the early Web community, such as Tim Berners-Lee,”* says Marc Weber, a curator at the Computer History Museum, who has studied the history of mobile devices. Cellphone companies took note of Psion’s success. Ericsson and Nokia knew they needed high-quality mobile software for their smartphones. They also wanted phone makers to control their own operating systems rather than outsource them to outsiders like Microsoft. When Psion floated the idea of a partnership, they were receptive. Rydbeck says: “We realized that soon software would be a whole area of its own, not just a little thing on the side. Microsoft was beginning [mobile software work] and suggested we could partner with them. But we thought cellular companies might be able to own this technology.”

In June 1998, Psion spun off its software division to create a joint venture, called Symbian. Psion became the largest shareholder and viewed the deal as a way to reduce its operating costs and gain access to the emerging smartphone market. Ericsson and Nokia, which originally each took a 30 percent ownership, got a tried-and-tested, mobile-specific operating system independent of Microsoft’s control and high licensing rates. Motorola formally joined Symbian in October 1998, and Japan’s Matsushita (Panasonic) followed in 1999.

Symbian became a London-based company that produced an operating system and basic apps that its owners and other companies could license. It was Symbian’s job to develop software components that enabled a range of smartphone services—everything from a phone’s communications to its multimedia support to its core, preloaded applications. Symbian then packaged these components into a few “reference designs” for phone makers, who selected the reference design they liked, licensed the software, integrated it into their hardware, and paid Symbian $5 for every smartphone they shipped. Symbian also created SDKs, so third-party developers could build apps for Symbian phones.

The Symbian founders considered themselves a team of equals, but Nokia “quickly moved ahead and became the ‘big brother’ in the team,” says Rydbeck. The power shift reflected Nokia’s strength in the market, where it was taking share from both Motorola and especially Ericsson. Compared to its longtime European rival, Nokia had more phone models, a better-known brand, and lower costs, due to its larger size. It was also the first company to launch a complete version of Symbian that was fully compatible with third-party applications, content, and services. This new version appeared in 2001 on its third-generation 9210 Communicator.

As Nokia widened its lead as the world’s largest cellphone and smartphone maker, its competitors gradually withdrew from Symbian, an irony, since Symbian itself had been the cellphone industry’s response to another company’s attempt to dominate the market—Microsoft. Microsoft had entered the mobile software market in 1996, when it started selling manufacturers a lightweight version of its Windows operating system called Windows CE. Microsoft had made several earlier attempts to develop a mobile version of Windows but, dissatisfied with the results, had scrapped the projects. But in what Businessweek observed as “a classic example of how Microsoft stubbornly pushes its way into new fields, even if it takes years,”38 Microsoft continued to refine what became Windows CE and convinced a number of big companies, including the American PC makers Compaq and Hewlett-Packard (HP), the Japanese electronics maker Casio, and the European electronics maker Philips, to adopt it and make handheld PCs, which resembled small laptops. The software enabled portable use of condensed versions of Microsoft Office apps so business travelers could work while away from their PCs.

Microsoft spent the next decade adding features to Windows CE and making it compatible with more devices. In 1998, Microsoft released a version that device makers could use for what it called Palm PCs—smaller, lighter, touchscreen PCs that users could operate with one hand. Though they were bulkier and more expensive, they were Microsoft’s answer to Palm’s Pilot PDAs, right down to their name. Inevitably, Palm sued over the name, forcing Microsoft replaced that operating system with software called Palm-size PCs. In 2000, Microsoft redesigned Windows Pocket PC. Pocket PCs retained the organizer features of the earlier handheld and Palm PCs but had a simpler user interface. They also added support for multimedia, including digital MP3 songs, video clips, electronic books, and audio books.

Though a few companies produced Windows-based PDA-phones as early as 2001, the first device to be widely recognized as a “Microsoft-powered smartphone”39 was the Orange SPV. A collaboration between Microsoft, Taiwan’s HTC, and the European carrier Orange, the SPV was launched in Europe in 2002 and used Microsoft’s Smartphone 2002 software, which was designed to challenge Symbian and the Palm OS and included Microsoft Outlook’s e-mail and calendar features as well as slimmed-down versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s MSN Messenger instant messaging service, and Windows Media Player. The Wall Street Journal criticized the small (4.3 inches by 1.78 inches by 0.78 inches; 3.35 ounces) candy bar–shaped phone for being “packed with a bewildering array of features, many of them cool, others clumsy,”⁴⁰ and users complained about the phone’s short battery life and the software’s tendency to freeze, but a low price ($278) and a $20 million joint marketing campaign helped sell 50,000 of the phones in Britain within six months.⁴¹ A year later Microsoft adopted the name Windows Mobile for its mobile software, noting that “Windows is a brand customers associate with powerful and familiar software,”42 and continued updating it with new features and improvements on a close to annual basis.

I-MODE AND JAPAN

In the early 2000s, Microsoft owned Windows Mobile, Nokia (mostly) owned Symbian, the reintegrated Palm (which acquired Handspring in 2003) owned Palm OS, and RIM owned its suite of BlackBerry technology. No one owned the mobile Web—except in one country. In Japan, a single company dominated the mobile Web for years. That company was a carrier: NTT DOCOMO.

Though it wasn’t always obvious to the rest of the world, Japan has been a wireless technology leader for decades. Japan was the first country to launch a 1G network, in 1979, and the first country to launch a commercial 3G network, in 2001. Japan’s Sharp was the first phone maker to integrate a camera into a cellphone, in 2000, and Japan was one of the first countries to embrace the use of cellphones as mobile wallets, in 2004.

Japan also sparked the world’s first mobile media revolution, in 1999, via DOCOMO’s mobile Web service, i-mode. DOCOMO was early to understand that people wanted quick, easy access to lots of online content on their phones. Browsing the Web via phone has never been easy. “The way the Web developed was not friendly to lower-powered, mobile devices,” says Marc Weber. “The Web was primarily designed for big computer monitors, so early smartphones needed to resize Web pages and make graphics simpler.” DOCOMO didn’t solve all of these problems, but with the help of a Japanese software firm called ACCESS, it figured out how to maximize the technology available at the time.

In its early years, i-mode ran on small flip phones and featured a dedicated “i” button. Pressing the button launched a browser that loaded DOCOMO’s i-mode portal. The portal linked to hundreds of websites written in compact HTML, a simplified version of the code that developers use to add basic design elements to Web pages and to link pages to each other. Compact HTML streamlines websites for better viewing on cellphones that have small screens and limited memory while still allowing sites to display simple graphics. websites had to be rewritten in compact HTML to display properly in the i-mode browser, but compact HTML’s similarity to HTML made the process relatively simple and affordable. This was one of i-mode’s strengths when compared to WAP, which Europe and the United States used to translate the Web to phones; WAP sites used a different, less familiar programming language, and thus took longer to create. ACCESS developed compact HTML and the i-mode browser and supplied both to DOCOMO.

Within six months of launch DOCOMO had 116 “official” i-mode sites that it listed on its i-mode portal and more than 1,100 unauthorized sites that users could visit by typing in the Web address.43 By November 2000, i-mode boasted 23,000 official and unofficial sites, while WAP sites numbered less than 1,000.⁴⁴ The i-mode universe felt nearly as big as the regular Internet—and users didn’t have to dial up to see these sites. Unlike WAP, the i-mode service was always on.

DOCOMO didn’t just convince people to go online regularly from their phones. It also got people to gladly pay to be online. Low rates and convenient billing were the key. Users paid small fees for access to i-mode, for the amount of data they consumed while online, and for any content they purchased from i-mode sites. In 1999, i-mode–equipped phones cost between $100 and $350 each, the service’s monthly access fee was $3, and a user’s average monthly spending was about $19.⁴⁵ DOCOMO added the fees to subscribers’ monthly phone bills and acted as a money middleman. It paid i-mode content providers on behalf of the users and charged the companies 9 percent for processing. Since using i-mode didn’t feel onerous or expensive, people quickly became active, paying customers. As a result, i-mode–hosted services, ranging from daily horoscopes to online banking, flourished and multiplied. Like the sale of smartphone apps today, the system was a positive feedback loop in which success fed success.

By 2001, DOCOMO was Japan’s largest company by market capitalization.⁴⁶ By early 2002, one in four Japanese people used i-mode.⁴⁷ Outsiders often attribute its traction to cultural conditions, citing a Japanese predilection for technology and shopping. Tomihisa Kamada, who led i-mode technology development at ACCESS, says it was actually Japan’s advanced wireless networks and carrier-centric phone industry that enabled it to take off. I-mode technology was fast enough to offer instant gratification, and DOCOMO wielded enough power over phone makers and content providers to establish a cohesive phone/mobile content/billing ecosystem.

Japan was perhaps the only country where carriers had such wide-ranging clout; when DOCOMO tried to expand i-mode to Europe, the United States, and some Asian countries, the system flopped. I-mode is also a prominent example of the ways Japan’s cellphone industry tends to be innovative yet insular. The Nomura Research Institute, Japan’s largest information technology consultancy, named this the “Galápagos effect.” Like the exotic animals and plants that evolved on the Galápagos Islands, phones and mobile services developed for the Japanese market are often unique in the world—highly adapted to their own environment but incompatible with other regions.

Though i-mode did not flourish globally, its domestic success taught smartphone companies around the world significant lessons. It showed that consumers wanted to use the mobile Web and would pay for access and content, provided they saw value in it. I-mode phones demonstrated how to create a Web-centric user experience even without a modern smartphone operating system. Ryuji Natsuumi, an ACCESS executive who developed the i-mode browser along with Kamada, says, “Without the i-mode handset, the evolution to the smartphone would have taken longer.”

I-mode also illustrated the need to offer consumers a wide variety of mobile Web content, and proved that a single company could foster a mobile content ecosystem capable of growing at a viral rate. These ideas cropped up again in the iPhone. The iPhone would deliver a real Internet experience rather than a trimmed-down, mobile-only one, and formed its own robust ecosystem, with Apple firmly in charge.

By the end of 2002 the first generation of smartphones had launched and found audiences. BlackBerrys claimed much of the business market and other users who needed fast, secure e-mail access. Microsoft was getting up to speed with its smartphone software, which attracted both business users and consumers. Treos appealed to people who were used to Palm devices and wanted user-friendly software. Symbian phones held sway in Europe through Nokia and Sony Ericsson, a London-based joint venture; Sony and Ericsson formed in 2001 by merging their cellphone businesses. I-mode phones had captivated Japan with their easy mobile Web access and moved millions of people online.

Most of these first-generation smartphones had real operating systems. They would soon be given color screens, cameras, Bluetooth48 and Wi-Fi⁴⁹ and Global Positioning System (GPS)⁵⁰ connections, and music and video capabilities, if they didn’t already have them. Apps were still relatively simple, though, touchscreens couldn’t recognize more than one finger at a time, and the mobile Web was usually a lesser version of the regular Web. This would remain the status quo until the iPhone upended everything.

* Siemens, a German electronics and engineering company, produced cellphones from 1985 to 2005.

* Handspring decided to ship the Treo 180 as a GSM device and add GPRS functionality later, through a software upgrade. That decision gave RIM leeway to market the 5810 as North America’s first GSM/GPRS wireless handheld.

* The British computer scientist who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web.