alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.