IBM Simon (1994): the original smartphone, explained in its own ad [video]

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.

You should watch the Apple Newton commercials too:

https://youtu.be/lkg4EAK0Y30

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.)

Isn't it interesting that some companies like IBM and Siemens completely lost the ability or will to produce end user products? (Before you answer that your kitchen appliance is from Siemens, let me tell you it is not. It's from Bosch who put a Siemens sticker on it).

I love the pace of the commercial btw, which could also have been done by Vsauce.

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