The first smartphone, IBM Simon

The IBM Simon Personal Communicator (simply known as IBM Simon) has the privilege to be the First Smart Phone in the history.

IBM Simon was a handheld, touchscreen PDA. It was designed and engineered by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and assembled under contract by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. BellSouth Cellular Corp. distributed the Simon Personal Communicator in the United States between August 1994 and February 1995, selling 50,000 units.

The Simon Personal Communicator was the first PDA to include telephony features.

IBM debuted a prototype device, code named “Angler,” on November 23, 1992 at the COMDEX computer and technology trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. The Angler prototype combined a mobile phone and PDA into one device, allowing a user to make and receive telephone calls, facsimiles, emails and cellular pages.

The final product was named as, “Simon Personal Communicator”in November 1993.BellSouth Cellular initially offered the Simon throughout its 15-state service area for US$899 with a two-year service contract or US$1099 without a contract. Later in the product’s life, BellSouth Cellular reduced the price to US$599 with a two-year contract.

BellSouth Cellular sold approximately 50,000 units during the product’s six months on the market.[1]

Although the term “smartphone” was not coined until 1995, because of Simon’s features and capabilities, it has been referred to as the first smartphone.

Features
IBM Simon had the its ability to

• make and receive cellular phone calls,
• send and receive faxes, e-mails and cellular pages.
• Simon featured many applications, including an address book, calendar, appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock, electronic notepad, handwritten annotations, and standard and predictive stylus input screen keyboards.

Accessories
Each Simon was shipped with a charging base station, two nickel-cadmium batteries and a protective leather cover. Optional was a PCMCIA pager card designed by Motorola, an RS232 adapter cable for use with PC-Link to access files from a personal computer, and an RJ11 adapter cable to allow voice and data calls to be made over POTS land-lines. The RJ11 adapter helped users reduce expensive cellular phone bills or make calls where cellular coverage didn’t exist in 1994.

Operating system and applications
The Simon used the file system from Datalight ROM-DOS along with file compression from Stacker. IBM created a unique touch-screen user interface for Simon; no DOS prompt existed. This user interface software layer for Simon was known as the Navigator.

The Simon was up-gradable and could run third party applications. This was possible either by inserting a PCMCIA card or by downloading an application to the phone’s internal memory.