How it Started - Human-Computer Interaction and Innovation in Handheld, Mobile and Wearable Technologies - page 173

the intention was that military and intelligence staff
would use proprietary hardware to send data over
public landline telephone networks - a technique
not dissimilar from modern commercial VPNs.
More ambitious devices developed in the realm
of science fiction, such as Douglas Adams' The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on BBC radio
beginning in March, and Gordon Dickson's story
Thank you, Beep published that summer 1 in the
Hewlett-Packard Calculator Journal.
It would take time for reality to equal the hype.
Miniature landline acoustic modems only avail-
able to the defense and intelligence community
in 1978 were publicly launched by the early- and
mid-1980s. Two examples of devices which could
employ such technology were Panasonic's RLH-
1400 Hand Held Computer (introduced in 1981)
and Psion's Organiser (introduced in Britain in
1984), both in support of applications such as file
transfer and remote access to larger computers.
Data advances in handheld devices finally
began changing from wired into wireless in the
first half of the 1990s. Among the most success-
ful advances was the Nokia 1011 introduced in
1992. It was the first commercial GSM phone and
therefore the first with text messaging. Texting is
based on radio protocols, not Internet protocols,
but at the time it showed consumers and service
providers alike that mobile phones had applica-
tions potential beyond telephony. Also that year,
IBM targeted its 9075 “PCradio” subminiature
laptop at Sears field technicians, so they could
access service documents. Similar technology
was available for Atari and Hewlett-Packard's
own handhelds (Gregg 1992). Next, an optional
cellular modem was available for AT&T's EO 440
in 1993. Motorola's L3000 phone introduced the
iDen push-to-talk application in 1994; and cel-
lular modems appeared in Apple Newton clones
such as the Motorola Marco and Digital Ocean
Seahorse in 1995 and 1996, respectively. By this
point, Tim Berners-Lee's nascent World Wide
Web was engulfing the Internet, and laboratories
such as the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

began evaluating the feasibility of Web browsers
for prototype mobile devices such as the ParcTab
(Theimer et al., 1993).
However, it appears that the first mobile con-
sumer device with native Internet applications
was the IBM Simon, developed by engineers at
IBM's Boca Raton, Fla. facility in 1992 and 1993.
“To me it was somewhat of an obvious idea,” lead
architect Frank Canova said in a 2007 interview.
IBM's executives were convinced to allow the
development of a smartphone when members of
the Simon team appeared at meetings carrying a
bag with a portable computer, fax machine, orga-
nizer, and telephone. Bigger challenges included
battery life, component miniaturization, and
designing a user interface without any previous
examples, he said. The pioneering smartphone also
included a memory card slot, predictive text entry,
a touchscreen, and wireless software updates - all
still considered modern features today. Code-
named Sweat Pea, it entered the market through
BellSouth in 1994, but was discontinued later
that year despite plans among Canova's team for
improved versions.
Simon was not without its problems, namely
that it cost $899, weighed 1 lb., 2 oz., and ran
software bound by the limitations of DOS. Nor did
its impressive capabilities include a Web browser.
Smartphones in the second half of the decade
quickly became more modern, such as Nokia's
1996 application of a QWERTY keyboard in the
9000 Communicator; Research In Motion's “push”
e-mail focus for its first BlackBerry pager device
in 1998; and Qualcomm's use of the then-leading
PalmOS design in the pdQ Smartphone in 1999.
That year also saw the birth of Wireless Access
Protocol browsers, with Nokia's 7110 phone as
the first deployment.

REFERENCES

Gregg, Lynne (1992). Living in a wireless world
with PDAs. Infoworld.