Our world before smartphones was cold and uneasy. The contemporary smartphones took a lengthy 28-year hike to reach us here in 2020. A lot of happenings occurred back in ’92, like Microsoft’s release of Windows 3.1, the cold war coming to an end, the creation of the IBM ThinkPad 700C laptop, and the Barcelona-held Olympics games, etc.
All these happenstances and more, yet an ingenious innovation took the market by the storm. In ’92, IBM unveiled the foremost smartphone. It took a whole two years for the device to officially hit stores for an excellent price of $1,100 a per unit, and barely six months after its release, it had sold a whopping 50,000 units.
While individual cellphones were around since the ’70s, the arrival of smartphones hit the end consumers differently.
I’m glad to take you down memory lane on how each design and step came into place.
Origin
What Did The Year 1994 Give Us?
IBM created the premier smartphone, which was invented in 1992 and released for purchase in 1994 - as stated earlier. It was named Simon Personal Communicator - SPC for short. It was not as compact and sleek, as you’d expect a smartphone to be. However, the device still had the typical features of a smartphone - features and several elements which later became ideal to every smartphone that followed.
For a model, the SPC was adorned with a touchscreen, as well as the capability to send and receive both emails and faxes. It possessed a calendar, address book, and a native appointment scheduler. The SPC even had a standard and predictive stylus input screen keyboards!
Early Twenty-Hundreds
Before the year 2000, smartphones weren’t connected with an actual 3G network. This means that a mobile communications standard was built to allow portable electronic devices access to the internet wirelessly. BlackBerry at a point became the gamechanger for the smartphone industry.
However, the first BlackBerry smartphone was BlackBerry 5810. It essentially targeted business experts. They kept releasing various other advanced devices and became the market lead for smartphones, until the iPhone came, and beat it to its game.
What Did 2007 Bring To The Table
The actual representation of the smartphone revolution was born in 2007 - at the advent of Macworld when Steve Jobs revealed the first iPhone. Prior to its release, phones relied on keypads and could only navigate a watered-down version of the internet. The iPhone’s large touchscreen could navigate through webpages - just like a PC. Nonetheless, it never forgot to be sleek while at it.
The device had two versions, 4GB which was sold at $499 and the 8GB version, which also went for $599. It boasted of better battery life -which consisted of 8 hours of talk time, while 250 hours was its standby time! Having met with impediments, (in comparison to how easy it was to type on a blackberry physical keyboard vs the original one finger at a time iPhone touchscreen) it still managed to leave its marks in history books - which still lasts to this day.
Summary
The journey of the smartphone may not be as long. From the very first mobile device to the first smartphone, all the way to today, one thing has stayed the same. Texting is and always will be a
part of the mobile narrative. And as any text marketer knows, that’s the side of history we want to be on.
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