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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> it wasn’t until the Treo series
This was because the acquisition of Handspring, right?
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.
Don't mind. He probably had a Vx :)
Yeah, that will do it.
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.
There was a whole generation of touch focused devices around '99-'03 or so, mostly hampered by too slow hardware, too low resolutions, awful battery life and awful capacitative touch.
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 abandoned it, before Apple resurrected it.
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 :).