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In 2007, Steve Jobs stood on a stage and denounced the “smart”phone—ugly, mismatched keyboards of Nokia and RIM. Rightfully! But he also championed Apple as the mobile keyboard killer. However, IBM beat them almost two decades earlier.
The Simon, an unassuming collaboration between Apple antithesis IBM and Bellsouth (?) in 1992, sported an entirely touch-based interface. No buttons, no keys, and certainly no keyboard. Instead it presented nothing but a slender slab of grayscale display that would adapt to the given application—calendar, calculator, phone calls, etc. Sound familiar?
Granted, the Simon wasn’t exactly on the app store level of sophistication—it included fax machine functionality, after all—but the basic idea is there, in 1992. Get rid of the keyboard! Unfortunately, it was an enormous Zack Morris machine, as 90s phones tended to be, and far too ahead of its time. But there’s something beautiful about a good idea too early, and I’ll always be a sucker for 90s matte black minimalism.
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What???? Next you’ll be claiming that Steve Jobs didn’t create the universe, this is nothing short of Heresy. /sarc
Something tells me you really don’t like apple?
That’s a common misunderstanding.
Numerical pad and QWERTY keyboards aside, doesn’t the iPhone have about five physical buttons? But I digress.
IBM didn’t beat Apple; it beat Neonode and LG – both of whom had touchscreen phones on sale before Jesus.
I agree others were around before the iPhone, what Apple has done very well though I sell to the masses, much of that is due to the complete package they offer, in terms of the OS and after sales products and platform.
But apple was part of the collaboration as stated above in creating a entirely touch based user interface! Isn’t that a key feature of today’s smart phones? Well done Apple..
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2003/02/26/dpreviewmobile/print
A really nice phone with excellent finger writing input. Much over looked by one and all.
Surely every phone ever made has been all touch? Unless someone has a phone controlled by tossing it against a wall I should know about.
The LG KE850 Prada was an award winning phone that sold millions and was incredibly similar in appearance to the iPhone, yet it was unveiled months before iPhone’s release. Samsung also had their own similar design F700 out before Apple’s iPhone hit the market. LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson had spent years working on and releasing touchscreen interfaces for phones before Apple even got involved in the phone market space.
Yes, in many ways it could be argued that Apple took the look and feel of these early phones and simply refined them into a product that would appeal to the masses. However for Apple to argue that their designs have been ripped off is disingenuous to say the least.
What is even more concerning, is that people genuinely believe Apple’s hype when they proclaim that they reinvented the phone when in actual fact mobile’s were already heading in this direction anyway. The true mobile phone innovators have now largely been forgotten and history is being rewritten by slick marketing techniques.