alt Hacker NewsIBM Simon (1994): the original smartphone, explained in its own ad [video]
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You should watch the Apple Newton commercials too:
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.)
They even predicted that smartphone users would inevitably ruin the (movie) theater experience (skip to 3:55 and 4:57)
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.
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...
How much did this bad boy cost?
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).
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.
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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.